Historical Society of the NY Courts, 140 Grand Street, Ste 701, White Plains, NY (2026)

09/01/2026

As the 25th anniversary of September 11 approaches, the Historical Society is revisiting New York’s legal history surrounding the attacks and their aftermath. We begin with Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye’s decision to open the courts back up as soon as possible.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Kaye was in Albany for an access to justice conference. By the end of the day, that became an immediate and literal need. One court facility had been located inside the World Trade Center. Other Manhattan courthouses were inaccessible. Communications failed, public offices were closed, and no one was sure what to do.

Within days, Kaye toured courts in Lower Manhattan, met with city engineers, and arranged new telephone service. She coordinated with her government colleagues and the organized bar, including from court headquarters inside the restricted “frozen zone.” About 1,300 lawyers had lost their offices, while another 14,000 had been displaced.

Kaye decided that the courts would reopen on Monday, September 17.
Conditions remained difficult. Court employees had been killed, much of Lower Manhattan was still closed, and many people could not reach their offices, records, or courtrooms.

Opening courtrooms back up required pragmatism and a clear commitment that their work must continue. That included arraignments, emergency applications, family matters, and proceedings affecting people’s homes, safety, and liberty.

The attack changed many things, but the need for rule of law didn’t change – and become more urgent because of them.

Reopening the courts six days after September 11 demonstrated that New York’s government remained present and accountable to the people it served. Within several weeks, the courts were again operating at full speed, with tighter security and an understanding of how vulnerable public institutions could be.

Photo by Paul Morse, courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and National Archives.

08/31/2026

Leslie W. Russell’s two years as New York Attorney General ended with an unusually organized campaign against him. In 1883, woman-suffrage advocates blamed Russell for helping block legislation that would have expanded women’s voting rights.

After he advised the Legislature that women had no common-law right to vote and that the proposed bill was unconstitutional, activists circulated protests against his reelection. Some even distributed Republican ballots on which Russell’s name had been replaced by that of his Democratic opponent, Denis O’Brien. Russell lost by about 13,000 votes.

Russell had spent most of his life and early career in St. Lawrence County. Born in Canton on April 15, 1840, he began teaching school at sixteen before studying law in Albany and Milwaukee. He was admitted to the bar in 1861 and opened a practice in Canton. In 1864, he married Harriet Jane Lawrence. They had six children, two of whom died in infancy.

His rise in public office also began close to home. Russell represented St. Lawrence County at the 1867 state constitutional convention, won election as district attorney in 1869, and became county judge in 1877. The following year he joined the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, where he remained until 1891.

Republicans nominated Russell for Attorney General in 1881. He took office on January 1, 1882, succeeding Hamilton Ward Sr., and served until his defeat by O’Brien two years later.

Russell then practiced law in New York City while remaining active in Republican politics. He attended the party’s national conventions in 1884 and 1900. Elected to Congress from New York’s 22nd district in 1890, he took his seat in March 1891. His congressional career lasted barely six months. Republicans nominated him that August for a seat on the state Supreme Court, prompting his resignation from Congress on September 11. Voters elected him to the Fourth Judicial District on November 3.

Russell remained on the bench until October 1, 1902, when he resigned.

08/28/2026

In late August, 1835, a lithograph depicting winged humanoids, lunar bison, and other supposed inhabitants of the moon was deposited for copyright with the clerk of the Southern District Court. It was part of one of the most successful newspaper hoaxes of the nineteenth century.

Four days prior, The Sun published reports of discoveries made by the astronomer Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope. Using an immense new telescope, Herschel supposedly observed forests, oceans, temples, upright beavers, unicorn-like goats, and creatures named Vespertilio-homo: people who flew on bat-like wings.

Herschel really had conducted astronomical research in South Africa. The rest came from Richard Adams Locke, a reporter for The Sun. Locke presented the articles as the work of “Dr. Andrew Grant,” described as Herschel’s traveling companion, and claimed that they had been reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. Grant did not exist, and the journal had stopped publishing years earlier.

The story appeared in six installments and spread widely. Newspapers reprinted it, readers debated its truth, and The Sun sold the articles as a pamphlet. A lithograph allowed readers to see the lunar creatures for themselves.

The print made authoritative claims. Its title said that the animals were discovered by Herschel and copied from sketches in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. It also carried a federal copyright notice identifying Sun publisher Benjamin H. Day as the proprietor.

Copyright registration worked differently in 1835. Under the Copyright Act of 1831, authors and proprietors registered books, prints, maps, engravings, and musical compositions through the clerks of their local federal district courts. The claimant recorded the work’s title, placed a prescribed notice on published copies, and deposited a copy with the clerk.

Copyright law dealt with ownership and copying, leaving the scientific truth of the moon creatures outside the registration process.

The lithograph eventually passed into the collections of the Library of Congress. The clerk’s notation remains visible near its lower edge: “Deposited August 29, 1835.”

So do the bat people.

08/26/2026

Gertrude Schimmel stood at City Hall on August 26, 1971, as Mayor John Lindsay and Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy pinned captain’s bars to her uniform. She was the first woman in the New York City Police Department to hold the rank.

Schimmel joined the department in 1940 and won the Chief Inspector’s Trophy for excellence in her academy class. She entered a police force that treated women as a separate class of employee. “Policewomen” generally worked in the Bureau of Policewomen, handling cases involving women and children. Their work excluded patrol duty, and the rank offered no path to promotion.

Felicia Shpritzer challenged that system. In 1961, after nearly twenty years with the department, she and five other policewomen applied to take the promotional examination for sergeant. The city rejected all six. Its Civil Service Commission said policewomen did not hold an eligible title. Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy maintained that women lacked the strength and endurance required of sergeants.

Shpritzer brought an Article 78 proceeding on behalf of herself and other policewomen. In Matter of Shpritzer v. Lang, the Appellate Division held that law allowed policewomen to take the examination. Excluding them under the city’s Administrative Code, the court wrote, reflected “an archaic approach in light of modern day conditions.” The Court of Appeals affirmed in 1963, relying on city law and leaving the constitutional question undecided.

The ruling opened the 1964 sergeant’s examination to policewomen. Of the 126 women who took it, Shpritzer and Schimmel passed. They received their stripes in March 1965 and alternated supervising 160 policewomen. Both passed the lieutenant’s examination the following year and were promoted in 1967.

Schimmel’s promotion to captain came on the fifty-first anniversary of the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment. At the ceremony, she directed attention back to the woman who had gone to court. Felicia Shpritzer, she said, had won the case and deserved the praise.

08/21/2026

William Freeman died in his cell at Auburn Prison on August 21, 1847, seven months after New York’s Supreme Court of Judicature reversed his murder conviction. His case, preserved in the Society’s Legal History Archive, became an early test of the insanity defense.

Freeman was of African and Native American descent. At sixteen, he had been wrongly convicted of stealing a horse and sentenced to five years of hard labor at Auburn. Prison overseers punished him for stopping work to protest his innocence. During one beating, he suffered a severe head injury. He later became deaf and lived in a state of confusion.

After his release, Freeman sought compensation for his imprisonment. In March 1846, he entered the Van Nest home near Owasco Lake and killed four members of the family, including a two-year-old child.

Former Governor William H. Seward agreed to defend him. Public anger ran heavily against Freeman and his lawyer. Seward wrote to Thurlow W**d that there was “a busy war around me, to drive me from defending and securing a fair trial for the negro Freeman.” Attorney General John Van Buren prosecuted the case.

The court first asked a jury whether Freeman was competent to stand trial. It found that he was. During the murder trial, the judge excluded expert testimony concerning Freeman’s mental condition. Freeman was convicted and sentenced to death.

Seward sought review from the Supreme Court of Judicature. Justice Samuel Beardsley wrote that the competency finding did not resolve whether Freeman had been legally insane when the killings occurred. Evidence supporting that defense should have been heard by the trial jury. The court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial.

Freeman died of tuberculosis before the new trial could begin. A postmortem examination found advanced deterioration of his brain.

Our archive includes the case history and the digitized 1848 trial record: https://tinyurl.com/nyfreeman

📸: Rendering of William Freeman, Daily Cayuga Tocsin Extra, March 19, 1846. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

08/20/2026

By the time Skelos v. Paterson (https://www.nycourts.gov/Reporter/3dseries/2009/2009_06585.htm) reached the Court of Appeals, the Senate struggle that prompted Richard Ravitch’s appointment had ended. The appointment raised a question the court had never answered: could a governor fill a vacancy in the office of lieutenant governor?

Paterson relied on section 43 of the Public Officers Law. It directs the governor to appoint someone when a vacancy occurs in an elective office and no other law provides a way to fill it.

The senators pointed to article IV of the State Constitution. When the lieutenant governorship is vacant, it assigns the office’s duties to the temporary president of the Senate. They read that provision as the complete rule. The office remained empty until the next election for governor and lieutenant governor.

The Court divided 4–3. Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman’s majority treated article IV and section 43 as serving different purposes. The temporary president kept the lieutenant governor’s work going during a vacancy. An appointment under section 43 filled the position. Since the law excluded the lieutenant governorship from a separate midterm election, the appointee could serve until governor and lieutenant governor next appeared together on the ballot.

Judge Eugene Pigott’s dissent argued that article IV had already assigned every duty of the vacant office. In his view, that left nothing for an appointee under section 43 to do. He also pointed to the state’s experience with at least ten earlier vacancies. No governor had used section 43 to appoint a lieutenant governor. The dissent warned that the majority’s rule allowed a governor to choose the person next in the line of succession. That person might later become governor without ever having appeared on a statewide ballot.

On September 22, 2009, the Court reversed the Appellate Division and upheld Ravitch’s appointment. Ravitch served through the end of Paterson’s term. The decision supplied the authority later used to fill new vacancies in the lieutenant governorship by appointment.

08/19/2026

Over the summer on 2009, the State Senate had its share of troubles. The trouble began on June 8, when Democratic Senators Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram Monserrate joined Republicans in an attempt to replace the Senate’s leadership. Both sides claimed control of the chamber. After Monserrate returned to the Democratic conference, the Senate stood evenly divided at 31–31.

When Eliot Spitzer resigned in March 2008, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson became governor and his former office fell vacant. New York law provided no settled method for replacing him.

The lieutenant governor serves as president of the Senate and may cast a tie-breaking vote on procedural questions. The competing factions also recognized different temporary presidents, leaving uncertainty over who stood next in line to become governor.

Paterson called special sessions as senators argued over who could conduct business. On July 8, he appointed Richard Ravitch lieutenant governor. No New York governor had filled the office by appointment before. Paterson relied on section 43 of the Public Officers Law, which allows the governor to fill a vacancy when the law supplies no other method. Ravitch accepted the appointment and filed his oath that night.

Senators Dean Skelos and Espada sued the next day. They argued that lieutenant governors had to be elected with governors and that the statute could not supply an appointment power absent from the Constitution. A Nassau County judge issued a preliminary injunction barring Ravitch from acting as lieutenant governor. Paterson appealed.

On August 20, the Appellate Division, Second Department, affirmed the injunction. Its four judges found no constitutional or statutory authority for the appointment. During a vacancy, they concluded, the temporary president of the Senate could perform the lieutenant governor’s duties. The office itself could only be filled through an election.

Paterson and Ravitch took the case to the Court of Appeals, which agreed to hear it on an expedited schedule. More on that tomorrow!

📸: Richard Ravitch, 2009. Photograph by Matt Ryan, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

08/17/2026

Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat left New York City for Albany on August 17, 1807. Carrying paying passengers up the Hudson at about five miles per hour, it completed the trip in roughly 32 hours.

Often called the Clermont today, the vessel had a different name in its time. Fulton called it the North River Steamboat. Earlier inventors had built steamboats, and Fulton later developed them into a commercially successful passenger service.

That success rested partly on an exclusive right granted by New York. The state had given Robert Livingston a monopoly over steamboat navigation in New York waters. Livingston partnered with Fulton, and the Legislature extended their control as they developed regular service. Other operators needed a license from them to use steam power on the state’s waterways.

The arrangement became harder to maintain as steamboat travel expanded. Aaron Ogden held a license under the Livingston-Fulton monopoly to carry passengers between New Jersey and New York City. His former business partner, Thomas Gibbons, began running competing boats on the same route under a federal coastal-trade license. Cornelius Vanderbilt, early in his career, operated boats for Gibbons.

Ogden obtained an injunction from the New York Court of Chancery. The Court for the Trial of Impeachments and Correction of Errors, then New York’s highest court, affirmed it. Under New York law, Ogden held the exclusive right to operate the route by steam.

Gibbons appealed to the United States Supreme Court, asking a foundational question: how did New York’s monopoly fit with Congress’s authority to regulate commerce among the states?

In 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that interstate commerce included navigation. Congress had regulated coastal trade through federal licensing, and New York could not prevent a federally licensed vessel from operating between New York and another state. The monopoly could not be enforced against Gibbons.

The injunction ended, more operators entered New York’s interstate steamboat trade, service expanded, and passenger fares fell sharply, opening the Hudson to widespread commercial travel.

📸: Clermont replica

08/13/2026

The New York State Assembly voted 79 to 45 to impeach Governor William Sulzer on August 13, 1913. Seven months into his term, Sulzer became the first New York governor to be impeached. He remains the only one.

Sulzer had spent much of his political career with Tammany Hall’s support. After eighteen years in Congress, he ran for governor in 1912 with the backing of Tammany leader Charles F. Murphy.

The relationship deteriorated soon after Sulzer took office. He resisted Murphy’s choices for state appointments and supported investigations into contracts awarded by the previous administration. He also backed a direct primary bill intended to reduce the power of party leaders over nominations.

Questions had also emerged about Sulzer’s 1912 campaign. An Assembly committee found that his financial report omitted several contributions. Witnesses testified that some donors considered their contributions personal gifts and that Sulzer had used the money to buy stocks. The articles of impeachment accused him of filing a false report, committing perjury, and attempting to influence witnesses.

The Assembly considered the articles during a special session Sulzer had called for his direct primary bill. Murphy worked with legislative leaders to secure the votes for impeachment.

The trial began in September before the Court for the Trial of Impeachments. Under the New York Constitution, that court consisted of state senators and judges of the Court of Appeals. Sulzer’s attorneys objected to using conduct from before his term as grounds for removal. The Court allowed the charges to proceed.

Sulzer did not testify. On October 17, the Court convicted him on three of the eight articles, involving his campaign report, perjury, and advice to another person to give false testimony. He was removed from office. The Court declined to disqualify him from holding office again.

On November 4, voters in Sulzer’s Lower East Side district elected him to the Assembly. He returned to Albany as a member of the chamber that had impeached him.

08/11/2026

The Historical Society of the New York Courts mourns the passing of Hon. John Carro, a pioneer in the New York judiciary and a longtime leader in the Latino legal community.

Born in Orocovis, Puerto Rico, in 1927, Justice Carro moved with his family to New York City at age 10 and grew up in East Harlem. After serving in the U.S. Navy, he attended Fordham University and Brooklyn Law School. His public service career included serving as an Assistant to New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner and later as a judge on the New York City Criminal Court.

In 1977, Justice Carro was elected to the New York State Supreme Court. Two years later, Governor Hugh L. Carey appointed him to the Appellate Division, First Department, making him the first Puerto Rican to serve on an Appellate Division court in New York State. He served on the First Department for 15 years, retiring in 1994.

Justice Carro was also a founding member of the organization that became the Latino Judges Association, originally established as the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage. He later served as its president. He was also a past president of The Puerto Rican Bar Association and held leadership roles with organizations including the Puerto Rican Forum and ASPIRA.

Reflecting on his passing, current Latino Judges Association President Hon. Elena Goldberg Velazquez said:

“Justice John Caro was a founder of the Latino Judges Association and a trailblazer in the Latino Legal Community. We offer our heartfelt condolences to the Caro family as they mourn their Patriarch and our Founder.”

Throughout his career, Justice Carro was committed to expanding opportunities for Latino lawyers and judges. Through his leadership and mentorship, he supported many members of the legal community and helped establish a stronger presence for Latino attorneys and jurists in New York and beyond. His example helped inspire generations of lawyers and judges who followed him.

The Society is particularly saddened by Justice Carro’s passing given his connection to the Latino Judges Association, with which the Society has a longstanding and valued relationship. We extend our condolences to his family, friends, colleagues, and to the many lawyers and judges whose careers and lives he influenced.

Justice Carro’s career and contributions will remain an important part of New York’s legal and judicial history.

Photo Courtesy Latino Judges Association: Founding members of the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage which later became the LJA; Justice Carro is on the front row, far right:

Back Row (L-R): Hon. Donald Grajales, Hon. Joseph Torres, Hon. Cesar Quinones, Hon. Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, Hon. Luis A. Gonzalez, Hon. Jaime A. Rios, Hon. Charles Tejada, Hon. Frank Torres, Hon. Raul Figueroa.
Front Row (L-R): Hon. Nicholas Figueroa, Hon. Gilbert Ramirez, Hon. Irma Vidal Santaella, Hon. John Carro

Historical Society of the NY Courts

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