Weissman v. Evans

• Decision Date: 02 July 1982
• Citation: 56 N.Y.2d 458,438 N.E.2d 397,452 N.Y.S.2d 864
• Parties: , 438 N.E.2d 397 Morton WEISSMAN et al., Individually and on Behalf of All Present and Future Judges of Suffolk County District Court, Respondents-Appellants, v. Herbert EVANS, as Administrative Judge and Chief Administrator of the Courts of the State of New York, and as Representative of the Administrative Board of the Judicial Conference of the State of New York, et al., Appellants-Respondents, et al., Defendant.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

Page 864

452 N.Y.S.2d 864

56 N.Y.2d 458, 438 N.E.2d 397

Morton WEISSMAN et al., Individually and on Behalf of All Present and Future Judges of Suffolk County District Court, Respondents-Appellants, v. Herbert EVANS, as Administrative Judge and Chief Administrator of the Courts of the State of New York, and as Representative of the Administrative Board of the Judicial Conference of the State of New York, et al Appellants-Respondents, et al., Defendant.

Court of Appeals of New York.

July 2, 1982.

Robert Abrams, Atty. Gen. (Jeffrey I. Slonim, Asst. Atty. Gen., and Shirley Adelson Siegel, Sol. Gen., of counsel), for appellants-respondents.

Frederic Block, Smithtown, for respondents-appellants.

Murray A. Gordon and Richard Imbrogno, New York City, for Willard W. Cass, Jr., and others, amici curiae.

OPINION OF THE COURT

FUCHSBERG, Judge.

The plaintiffs, District Court Judges of the Suffolk District Court, seek among other things, a judgment declaring the perpetuation of an unfavorable salary disparity between the plaintiffs and the Judges of the only other District Court in the State, that of adjoining Nassau County, violative of the equal protection provisions of our Federal and State Constitutions. ¹ As a supplementary item of relief plaintiffs also sought a judgment covering the resulting unconstitutional salary differential commencing with April 1, 1977, the date the Judges became employees of the State's unified court system. ² Named as defendant were the State, its Comptroller, the Chief Administrator of the Courts (both in this capacity and as the representative of the Administrative Board of the Judicial Conference) and the County of Suffolk.

The parties having stipulated that the facts were not in dispute, on a motion for summary judgment Supreme Court, Westchester County, sitting at Special Term, found merit in the constitutional claim and, in a judgment dated July 29, 1980, though it dismissed the complaint against the county, declared that the plaintiffs' right to equal protection will have been violated unless the other defendants (hereinafter "the State") took "all appropriate steps to end the salary disparity" prior to October 1, 1980. On cross appeals to the Appellate Division, Second Department, the State directed its attention to the declaration on constitutionality of the salary differential, while the plaintiffs addressed only the correctness of so much of the judgment as allowed the disparity to continue until October 1, 1980. The Appellate Division, 82 A.D.2d 441, 442 N.Y.S.2d 80, applying the rational basis test, as had the Supreme Court, and agreeing that the case presented a potential constitutional violation, modified the judgment by substituting April 1, 1982 for October 1, 1980 as the target date for elimination of the disparity and otherwise affirmed.

On cross appeals to this court, the State challenges the now modified declaration on constitutionality, while the plaintiff Judges confine themselves to "the issue of the appropriate starting date on which plaintiffs were entitled to receive parity with the Judges of the District Court of Nassau County". For the reasons which follow, we find that the wage disparity represents an unconstitutional impairment of the plaintiffs' right to equal protection of the laws and that, by way of ancillary relief, the plaintiffs are entitled to judgment for the differentials which were their due since October 1, 1978.

A pivotal point in the events which led to this litigation was the enactment of the unified court budget act, which, to implement the State's takeover of the courts, provided that judicial personnel were henceforth State employees and that, concordantly, they would be placed on the State payroll on April 1, 1977 (Judiciary Law, § 39, subd. 6 [L.1976, ch. 966, § 2]).

This abolished the prior system, in which, in many instances, the salaries of Judges, including those in both the Suffolk and Nassau District Courts (L.1962, chs. 35, 811), were determined and financed in part by localities. The implications of the change so effected were not left to imagination. As the preamble to the statute put it, "It is both uneconomical and inefficient to have the responsibility of funding this state-operated court system divided among various units of local government. This divided funding blurs responsibility and accountability for an effective court system and makes the operation of each of the state courts dependent upon varying fiscal capabilities of individual local governments * * * Funding by a single fiscal authority will enable the allocation of moneys and manpower when needed unimpeded by artificial local boundaries and the diverse competing needs of local governmental agencies" (L.1976, ch. 966, § 1 ).

Nonetheless, the act suffered existing disparities by a temporally open-ended provision that "salaries * * * shall continue in effect until altered by state law" (Judiciary Law, § 39 subd. 6, par. (L.1976, ch. 966, § 2] ). ³ Thus, no attempt was then made actually to eliminate discrepant financial treatment attributable solely to local government discretion and funding, precisely the kind of nonuniformity it was the avowed purpose of the act to remove.

Over two years later, when, by passing section 221-f of the Judiciary Law (L.1979, ch. 55), the Legislature finally did get around to establishing its own salary scales for its newly absorbed District Court Judges, it still chose to maintain rather than to eliminate the disparity. ⁴ This though on December 1, 1979, years after the State takeover, Judge Herbert Evans, Chief Administrator of the Courts, under legislative mandate that he "investigate whether unreasonable disparity exists in the compensation of judges of courts of the same rank in different parts of the state" (L.1979, ch. 55, § 4), reported to the Legislature, to the Governor and to the Chief Judge that continuation of disparity in the courts was "neither necessary, desirable nor equitable" and, with specific regard to the District Courts in Nassau and Suffolk, recommended that their salaries be equalized. Now at the six-year stage, this advice is yet to be heeded.

This long tolerance of the discrepancy cannot be ascribed to any doubt about the accuracy of Judge Evans' appraisal. For the facts plaintiffs proffered at nisi prius and the defendants did not there contest--and which neither court below found any reason in law to question--included expert appraisals that the two counties, which for many years have formed the State's Tenth Judicial District, constitute a "true unity of * * * judicial interest * * * indistinguishable by separate geographic considerations"; that the jurisdiction, practice and procedures of each of the District Courts and the functions, duties and responsibilities of their Judges are identical (see Uniform District Court Act); and, that, for practical purposes, as Judicial Conference data certify, their caseloads are substantially the same.

Indeed, lacking adequate explanation for the long delay in eliminating the disparity, the State, as in the lower courts, is now reduced to reiteration of its position that the territorial distinction, coupled with the history of the inequality practiced by the respective counties in years gone by, interdicts an equal protection claim.

It seems to us that the historical differential, in this case at least, cannot serve as a foundation for such an argument. The history to which it alludes almost inevitably was occasioned by the discordant results which were bound to flow from the discredited funding practice which permitted each county to go its own way. But, however intrenched the local influence at one time may have been, it had begun to lose its raison d'etre at least as early as 1962, when the State Constitution first prescribed a unified State-wide court system (N.Y.Const., art. VI, § 1, subd. a). Its demise obviously had become more imminent by 1972, when a legislative commission reported that "differential treatment within a given court level may be an obstacle to such unification" (Report on Compensation of New York State Legislators and Judges, April 30, 1972, State Commission on Legislative and Judicial Salaries, p. 30) and, needless to say, when, in the year before its April 1, 1977 effective date, the preamble to the unified court budget act spoke to the importance of the unified system's fiscal authority being "unimpeded by artificial local boundaries", the State must be deemed to have dealt the coup de grace to any remaining vestiges of the policy defendants' brief would now resurrect. In fine, if anything, unless ancient rather than recent history is resorted to, a study of the past proclaims the proposition that the State has for a considerable number of years come to view differential treatment within a given court level as an irrational rather than a rational way to further the public interest.

Little more can be said for the other prop on which...