T H E L E G A L WRITER
Daughter of the Empire State: Lessons in Legal Writing From New York Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye Gerald Lebovits (GLebovits@aol.com), an acting Supreme Court justice in Manhattan, is an adjunct at Columbia, Fordham, and NYU law schools. He thanks Matthew Goldstein (Columbia Law School), his judicial fellow, for his research. This is Judge Lebovits’s final column. He has served as the Journal’s Legal Writer for 20 years.
J
udith S. Kaye1 was born in 1938 in rural Sullivan County, New York. Forty-five years later, Governor Mario Cuomo appointed her associate judge of the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court.2 A decade later, in 1993, Kaye took charge of the court — and with it New York’s court system — as the court’s first female chief judge.3 From Monticello High School through her retirement from the judiciary in 2008, Kaye established herself as a litigator, a firm partner, and a prescient judge.4 Her opinions, majorities and dissents alike, survive with a New York State Bar Association
clarity and force typical only of America’s greatest judges.5 Her familiarity with the law was complete, even at home: Stephen Rackow Kaye, her husband of 42 years with whom she had three children, was a Proskauer Rose partner who wrote “the definitive work on commercial litigation in New York State.”6 The chief judge was respected across the nation. President Bill Clinton considered her both for attorney general and to fill the Supreme Court seat left open by Justice Byron White’s 1993 resignation.7 Kaye declined both positions, 58
Journal, July/August 2021
