In 1886, as the Court of Appeals’ calendar problems grew more urgent, New Yorkers at the polls overwhelmingly approved the call for a new constitutional convention. A convention was not convened until 1894 because Democratic Governors and Republican legislatures could not agree on a mutually acceptable method for the selection of convention delegates. In the interim, the legislature authorized the creation of a Commission charged with revising Article VI of the Constitution to address the problems of the Judiciary. The specific impetus for this legislation, approved by public referendum in 1888, was the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Law Reform, which sought to alleviate the overburdened Court of Appeals and avoid conflicting decisions from two simultaneously operating high courts with coequal authority.
The 38-member Judiciary Commission, consisting of many prominent lawyers, including former Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals George F. Danforth, began its work in June 1890 and submitted its final report and recommendations in March 1891. While the legislature initially rejected the Commission’s report, most of the proposals eventually were accepted by the delegates to the 1894 Convention and found their way into the new Constitution of 1894. With regard to the appellate courts, the Commission considered two basic options: adding more judges to the Court of Appeals or limiting the jurisdiction of the high court while empowering the intermediate appellate courts to serve as the final appeals tribunal for the vast majority of cases. This approach was endorsed by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, which sought “to obviate the overcrowding of the Court of Appeals calendar by establishing more effective and satisfactory courts of intermediate appeal, and enlarging their powers and jurisdiction.”
The Constitution of 1894
The new appellate court framework adopted by the Constitution of 1894 has remained essentially unchanged to the present day. It divided the Supreme Court into four judicial departments with an Appellate Division in each department consisting of five Justices whose principal duties were to hear appeals and serve as the court of last resort on all questions of fact and interlocutory appeals. The jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals was restricted to questions of law and, with few exceptions, to hearing only final determinations of the Appellate Division. Outside of a narrow range of specified cases, unanimous decisions of the Appellate Division generally were not appealable to the Court of Appeals unless first certified by that court or leave to appeal was granted by the Appellate Division. Appeals as of right to the Court of Appeals could be taken only when the Appellate Division reversed the original court or where an affirmance was not unanimous.
In this manner, the Appellate Divisions were to apply the established law of the state and correct trial court errors in the vast majority of appeals while the Court of Appeals would be free to address novel and important questions of law and to declare and settle the law of the state for the benefit of the lower courts, the bar and the public at large. The framers of the 1894 Judiciary Article expected that calendar congestion at the Court of Appeals would ease significantly. This expectation was quickly disappointed, leading to another constitutional amendment in 1899 temporarily expanding the Court’s membership. Nonetheless, the overall appellate framework adopted in 1894, innovative for its time, has endured without substantial change for well over a century. By and large, and with the help of periodic refinements, it has worked successfully to filter out the vast majority of appeals not meriting the attention of the Court of Appeals and foster the atmosphere of thoughtful deliberation and scholarship that led that tribunal to become the nation’s preeminent state high court.