An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.
-Finley Peter Dunne
The Constitution of Westarctica establishes but a single court, styled the “Grand Ducal Court” (Chapter IV; Article 21) in which the plentitude of the powers of the judiciary are vested until such time as lower courts may be established according to the provisions of Article 23.
Have you given any thought as to whose role it is to establish the future lower courts which our constitution anticipates? You may well suppose that it must surely be a prerogative of the legislative branch. Had you so imagined, your instincts, although understandable and well-placed, have betrayed you.
According to Article 23, “The Justices of the Grand Ducal Court, and any officers they may appoint, have responsibility for establishing, staffing, and managing the lower courts.”
And make no mistake, we aren't simply talking about the court appointing magistrate judges, here. No, the GDC is actually empowered to establish courts and to mint bona fide judges at all levels of the judiciary, save the that of the high court, itself. That's certainly a lot of authority and responsibility.
Think about that. The Constitution grants the GDC powers normally reserved to a nation's legislative branch (the power to establish courts and jurisdictions) and also endows it with powers that in most constitutional monarchies would belong to the Crown through the executive branch (the power to appoint judges).
That justices should beget judges as bishops beget priests is not a typical thing, after all, and one wonders how, exactly, they might go about doing that, procedurally speaking. One also wonders if future Westarcticans might not reconsider the arrangement. At the moment, however, that is what the Constitution prescribes.
So, what does all of that tell us about the Grand Ducal Court? A number of things, actually, but it conveys first and foremost the reality that the GDC is decidedly Westarctica’s high court--its “supreme” court, if you like--and a remarkably potent one at that. Once the lower courts are established in time, the Grand Ducal Court will stand at the pinnacle of the judicial system as our highest tribunal and our court of last resort, beyond which there can be no appeal.
That's a bit of a chilling thought, isn't it? The thought of a "court of last resort"...one final tribunal in which to argue your case in the hopes that the judgment goes your way. How high the stakes. How permanent the outcome. We like to think in terms of second chances or additional opportunities, don't we? Once we find ourselves standing before the nation's highest court, however, be it the US Supreme Court or the GDC, there are no more chances. We've used them all up and we have reached the end of the line. The power such a court has over our destiny, therefore, both as individuals and as a society, is immense.
As with any high court, however, the authority of the GDC to exercise judgment or to rule on the constitutionality of laws is only as actionable as the Court’s docket permits it to be. In order for the Court to exercise its most substantial powers, it is necessary that cases, petitions, or questions are brought before it. A court may neither bring cases before itself, nor may it preemptively rule on questions which have not yet darkened its doorstep.
Compare the Court, if you like, to a Venus flytrap waiting for an insect to land within its grasp. It isn't able to reach out and grab a fly in mid-flight. When the fly lands, however, the trap closes shut. The matter is irrevocably in the court’s jurisdiction and the court’s power over the case is, indeed, supreme.
Are all supreme courts, however, as supreme as our own Grand Ducal Court? Well, no, as it turns out; not by a long shot, in fact. From country to country and from region to region, final tribunals vary in scope and potency.
Let’s take, for example, the Supreme Court of the State of New York.
In my experience as a native New Yorker, folks who are not from New York tend to think of the whole of the state in terms of New York City (and of New York City in terms of Manhattan)…a brash, bustling, modern urban landscape dominated by skyscrapers and permeated by the sounds of motor vehicle traffic and emergency sirens. Autumn, however, is a good time to refresh our memories concerning that vast and brilliant rural, exurban, and suburban expanse of red, orange, and yellow Fall foliage which occupies the space between Canada and Pennsylvania…a land flowing with apple cider and maple syrup which we quaintly refer to as “Upstate”.
There are actually plenty of squabbles and differences of opinion among New Yorkers about what “Upstate” actually means, but we aren’t about to wade into that quagmire today. Instead, we will simply begin our journey into this topic using the “City that Never Sleeps” as our starting point, from which we will hop into a yellow cab and be driven northward up into the Hudson Valley to Sleepy Hollow. Once there, we will consider everything from that point on “Upstate”.
“Did he just say ‘Sleepy Hollow’?” Yes, he did. Sleepy Hollow, the village of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, is a real place on the map of New York State. The rest of Irving’s tale, of course, is fiction…one assumes.
Take a moment, if you like, to look around, breathe in the crisp autumn air, smirk at the teams of EMF detector-wielding paranormal investigators, and smell the ripening apples, but we can’t stay, I’m afraid. We’re going to hop back into our cab in just a moment because our ultimate destination, as it happens, is a bit further upstate than this haunting and legendary locale of Westchester County.
Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.
-Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
As modern, trend-setting, fashion-forward, culturally diverse, and socially progressive as New York City is, New York State, as a whole, is a rather tradition-bound state. We New Yorkers still address our governor as "His Excellency" (at least formally) and we refer to our mainline highway as the "Thruway". One of the original 13 colonies, New York was named in honor of James, Duke of York (later King James II). New York was the last colony to consent to the Declaration of Independence (abstaining throughout the Continental Congress), and she rather tenaciously clings to many of her oldest habits and conventions. New York’s court system is an excellent case in point, as we are about to discover.
Behold, then, the Empire State's Supreme Court, that colossus of judicial eminence. There, behind the bench, opposite the American flag, stands the gold-fringed royal blue flag of New York State, familiar to anyone who enjoys watching courtroom dramas on TV.
But why, you may ask, do we find New York's Supreme Court here, in Westchester County, so far removed from New York City?
The Supreme Court of the State of New York is actually a trial court, both civil and criminal. The New York State Supreme Court, as it happens, is not even a single body located in a single grand building within a single city. Instead, the Supreme Court, with 328 justices, is spread out across the state, with courthouses in each of New York’s 62 counties, including here in Westchester, where Sleepy Hollow is located.
If that seems a bit peculiar, it gets stranger, still. If you should happen to lose your case in the Supreme Court you can always appeal it.
Appeal, you say? To…what?
Cases adjudicated by the New York State Supreme Court are appealed within itself to an appellate level of the Supreme Court.
Wait...what?
Yes, that's right...should you find yourself so unfortunate as to lose your case in the Supreme Court, in a New York minute you can simply appeal to the Supreme Court to have your case tried again in the Supreme Court. Man, what a break; a supreme court with second chances! Did we not just reflect upon the chilling finality of judgments in supreme courts? Well, what can I say? This is New York, baby.
About now you’re thinking those ghost hunters in Sleepy Hollow chasing after the Headless Horseman seem sane compared to New York’s court system.
That isn’t the end of it, however; it gets even weirder. Should you happen to lose your case in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court there is a chance that you may yet be able to appeal it. Yes, it's true. In the Empire State, it so happens that there is a tribunal that is higher still than even the highest tier of the New York State Supreme Court.
Well, great Caesar’s galloping ghost; what could this preposterously lofty entity be…this towering court of courts which imperiously looks down its toffee nose at even the omnipresent Supreme Court of the State of New York, with all of its 62 locations, its two tiers, and its second chances, treating it as a mere lower court?
Is that why we have traveled so far outside the city? Is this court so great that only distance will enable us to view her in her entirety? Surely this court’s justices must be gods, or perhaps gigantic and fearsome flaming disembodied heads floating in a chamber akin to that of the Wizard of Oz, located, perhaps, in the uppermost stories of the Empire State Building whence they hurl down rulings like so many lightning bolts from the heavens.
Do I hear the sound of a galloping horse? It’s getting dark and we really ought to get out of here, pronto; Sleepy Hollow is no place to be at the witching hour on Halloween. Driver, head to Yonkers and take the Thruway north; we’re going to Albany.
Albany, gentle readers, not New York City, is the capital of New York State. Many people not from New York are surprised to discover that. Many people who live in New York City are also surprised to discover that, but that’s another matter for another blog; we won’t go there. This is a polite and respectable blog.
In any event, far upstate from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple in the comparatively small and sleepy capital of Albany, seven judges act as the guardians and supreme interpreters of the laws and the Constitution of the State of New York.
Here in the Empire State, the supreme tribunal and court of last resort is the august and venerable Court of Appeals, which, unlike New York’s Supreme Court (supreme in terms of findings of fact as opposed to questions of law), is not scattered all across the state and isn’t divided into two tiers. Comparable to most state supreme courts (which are "supreme" in the ordinary sense), New York’s Court of Appeals is located in one place, and beyond it there is no further appeal on the state level. Decisions by the Court of Appeals are binding upon all lower jurisdictions, including the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. The next level of appeal beyond the New York State Court of Appeals is the United States Supreme Court.
You may have noticed that judges who sit on the highest courts tend to be called "justices" whereas those on the benches of intermediate level courts are called "judges". That custom is reversed in New York State, where "judges" and not "justices" sit on the highest court. The presiding judge of the Court of Appeals is known as the “Chief Judge of the State of New York”. New York’s chief judge (as of this posting the Hon. Janet DiFiore) presides not only over the Court of Appeals, where she sits as primus inter pares, but over the whole of the Unified Court System of New York State. In her latter role she is assisted by the Chief Administrative Judge, who is responsible for the day-to-day supervision of the court system.
Disappoint you though I may, the judges of this super-supreme court are not, in fact, flaming disembodied heads hurling lightning bolts down from a great skyscraper, but rather a group of typical New York lawyers who hold court inside a charming old courthouse downhill from the Capitol, far removed from the imposing modernist monumentality of Albany’s breathtaking Empire State Plaza.
Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in the 1960s, sought to rid New York’s capital city of the old and rundown neighborhood stretching between the Executive Mansion and the Capitol called “The Gut”. Through sheer willpower and not without controversy, he did it, bulldozing the entire neighborhood, relocating its inhabitants, and building in its place a vast and somewhat intimidating modern capitol complex of concrete, marble, stone, and water radiating from the magnificent old Romanesque-style Capitol toward the governor’s residence. This was urban gentrification on steroids.
Five great Brutalist towers rise up from the plaza between the Capitol and the International-style New York State Museum, the largest of which (the Corning Tower) is the tallest building in Upstate New York. An enormous egg-shaped structure (aptly named “The Egg”), which is a center for the performing arts, is the most visually arresting architectural element of the complex. The platform of the plaza, itself, featuring three reflecting pools, is actually the rooftop of the Concourse, a vast indoor city-within-a-city which happens to be one of the largest buildings in the world.
The Court of Appeals, although originally located in the Capitol, did not remain there long enough to be a part of Rockefeller's immense imperial setting. In 1917, long before the justices of the U. S. Supreme Court would get their own building, the judges of the Court of Appeals vacated the New York State Capitol for a home of their own, selecting a very old building on Eagle Street which the state renovated and expanded in order to accommodate their honors.
Originally known as “State Hall”, the handsome neoclassical New York State Court of Appeals Hall was erected in 1842. It looks just like what you would expect a courthouse to look like, so much so that it seems difficult to comprehend that it wasn’t actually built as a courthouse. Faced with white marble and featuring a columned façade with a triangular pediment, the Hall is crowned with a low-lying dome.
Adding to the deceptive notion that the building could not ever have been anything but a courthouse is the antique yet sumptuous courtroom, itself, in which oral arguments are heard. When one takes the public tour of the Court of Appeals, however, one finds oneself standing in mild disbelief as the guide explains that the courtroom is, in fact, the original courtroom that was located in the Capitol prior to 1917. The courtroom was considered so venerable, as it happens, that the judges insisted upon taking it with them when they moved, and so it was disassembled, moved down the hill, and reassembled inside State Hall.
The courtroom was certainly worthy of preservation, having been designed by the great Henry Hobson Richardson. The lord chief justice of England and Wales, Lord Coleridge (in office 1880-1894), had once, on a visit to Albany, enthused about the beautiful New York Court of Appeals chamber, calling it “the finest courtroom in the world.” Small wonder, then, that the court wasn’t about to leave it behind.
I have been inside the New York State Court of Appeals (these photos were taken during a recent visit) and I can attest to the compelling handsomeness of the silent, red-carpeted courtroom. It is not by any means a very large chamber, mind you, and has none of the daunting majesty of, say, the US Supreme Court, but it certainly invites respect and reverence. It seems not unlike a dignified and well-appointed secular church, in a way; when you’re there, you find yourself walking with your hands folded and speaking in hushed tones.
From the splendid oak walls of this room where history has been made time and time again, painted portraits of past judges of the court look down at visitors, most notably that of John Jay, front and center. Jay, the first chief justice of the United States and second governor of New York, stands out from the rest, not only on account of his portrait’s central position, but also because of his dramatic billowing robes of scarlet and black silk. The portraits continue out into the similarly paneled vestibule of the courtroom, the area looking very much like something out of “Boston Legal”.
The bench is an intricately carved masterpiece of the woodworker’s craft, featuring a handsome rendition of the state’s coat of arms in the center, where the chief judge sits. Behind the bench rise seven high-backed chairs upholstered in leather, one for each of the judges. Just behind the chair of the chief judge is a hidden door from which the judges emerge to take their places at the bench to cries of "Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye!" The best part of the public tour, however, is that when it ends, the guide presents you with a pencil shaped like a judge’s gavel as a memento of your visit. A nice little touch, that.
Court of Appeals Hall is located in a perfectly lovely area of the capital city marked by exquisite architecture, and is situated directly across the street from a charming, well-shaded park with a splashing Victorian fountain. It seems a world away from the overwhelming modern bureaucrascape of the Capitol complex. A walk through the quaint and quiet neighborhood of the Court of Appeals (which seems to be an uphill walk in any direction) makes you consider that the judges actually chose rather wisely when opting to move out of the Capitol. It’s rather as if they wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle of politics on the hill, and they certainly managed it.
Part constitutional court, part appellate court, part court of cassation, the New York State Court of Appeals is the cat's meow of New York's court system and the fact that it has its own structure in its own charmed environs downhill of the Capitol truly underscores its independence.
If by now you've surmised that what's going on with New York's peculiar, upside-down judiciary amounts mostly to a simple reversal of federal nomenclature you aren't entirely wide of the mark, although I don't get the impression they turned it all on its head arbitrarily; there is a bit more to it, in fact.
The New York State Court of Appeals as an institution dates to 1847 when, by a new state constitution ratified that year, it was created to replace the old Court of Chancery, a superannuated institution presided over by the chancellor of New York and dating back to the days of British rule. Prior to 1847, the Court of Chancery was the high court of New York and the chancellor, with a role modeled on that of the lord chancellor of England, was the highest judicial figure in the state. The office of Chancellor of New York was abolished when the Court of Chancery was dissolved.
The Court of Appeals also replaced the “Correction of Errors” aspect of the old “Court for the Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors”. Both the Court of Chancery and the Court for the Correction of Errors, as more senior vestiges of the colonial judicial system, were above the state Supreme Court, which is why the Court of Appeals which replaced them is likewise superior to the supremes. The Court for the Trial of Impeachments (now styled as such) still exists on paper, incidentally, but is only convened as necessary (the last time was 1913).
Still, these colonial era precursors to the Court of Appeals were not, as it happens, the oldest courts in the state. The New York Court of Common Pleas, founded in 1686, was, at the time of its dissolution in 1895, the most antique common law court in New York. The Court of Common Pleas succeeded an even older court called "The Worshipful Court of the Schout, Burgomasters, and Schepens" instituted by the Dutch in New Amsterdam in 1653. The most ancient legal system in New York, however, is that of the Iroquois Confederacy, dating back to the 12th century.
The Grand Ducal Court of Westarctica as established by the Constitution of 2020 also has a traceable lineage back in time, as it happens. It succeeds a version of itself established by Government Ordinance 001 issued September 15, 2019, and that Grand Ducal Court is the successor to an even earlier court by the same name, established by the Grand Ducal Mandate of 2004. Although appeals courts and “independent” courts were also established by the Mandate, the Grand Ducal Court was nevertheless indentifiable by the language of the document as the court of last resort for the whole of Westarctica.
The Grand Ducal Mandate was suspended by the “Policy Statement of the Transitional Government (issued by the Prime Minister and Protector of Westarctica)” in 2010 and with it, the courts. The subsequent “Charter of Westarctica” of 2010 makes no mention at all of an independent judiciary.
Although detailed language pointing to the idea of a judiciary is found in the older Achean Civil Code of 2002 with numerous general references to “civil courts”, neither the Civil Code nor the adjacent Royal Code explicitly constituted or erected a distinct court or judicial entity by any unique name or title. With lengthy chapters devoted to “civil death” and “acts of decease”, however, the Achean Civil Code gives Washington Irving a run for his money in the area of eerie prose.
CURRRENT CLERK OF THE GDC
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