New York Court Watcher

Vincent Martin Bonventre, the Justice Robert H. Jackson Distinguished Professor at Albany Law School, inaugurated New York Court Watcher in May 2008. Court observer Bonventre offers research and commentary on the United States Supreme Court, the New York Court of Appeals, and other federal and state courts on a wide range of public law issues.

Since its inception, New York Court Watcher has published several hundred commentaries. Virtually all of them are based on original research. Voting patterns of Justices and judges, as well as decisional patterns of the courts on which they sit, are a staple of the commentaries. Courts, Justices and judges, and the politics surrounding them--as well as practiced by them--are examined from a realistic and practical perspective. That is, legal realism as opposed to formalism. From the perspective of a political scientist as well as a lawyer.

Website: http://www.newyorkcourtwatcher.com/
Follow:

New York Court Watcher Blogs

New York Court Watcher

Blog Authors

Vin Bonventre
Emily MacLoud

Latest from New York Court Watcher

Many readers are understandably upset with the Roberts Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and other decisions viewed as politically and socially regressive. But there is another side of Roberts and his Court–perhaps just a slice–that shouldn’t be overlooked. Some of the decisions exhibit a different character.

In Part 1, we looked at

…

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty ImagesLinda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize winning former
Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, recently put it this way: the
Chief Justice’s “vexation with Mr. Trump verges on acute concern.” [Linda
Greenhouse, Roberts Is Losing Patience With Trump, NY Times, Feb. 24,
2026.]Indeed, the “gratuitous” paragraph Greenhouse…

Source: Elizabeth Frantz/NY Times“The Supreme Court’s second-newest justice is proving herself to be a non-hack —to the increasing consternation of MAGA.”That’s Matt Ford, Associate Editor of the politically liberal The New Republic magazine.But it’s not just liberals who have nice things to say about Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Edward Whelan, former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia,

Source: Allison Robbert/NY TimesThe complete line: “She’s a rattled law professor with her head up her a**.”By the way, that’s from a gentleman named Mike Davis, speaking on Steve Bannon’s podcast. This Davis fellow actually served as the head counsel for nominations for the Republican Chair of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Shortly before that,…

Credit: @realDonaldTrumpIn Part 5 of this series, we saw that Justice Clarence Thomas broke with other political conservatives on the Court–sometimes joined by one of them–to dissent against a majority consisting of both liberal Democratic and conservative Republican appointees. In those cases, we saw that he argued against gun restrictions on domestic abusers, against restrictions

…

Yes, once again, the New York courts suffered an embarrassing unanimous, summary overruling of their decisions which persistently upheld the imposition of the state’s abortion coverage mandate upon religious objecting organizations, such as a Roman Catholic Diocese.

For years now, I’ve been discussing New York’s mandate that employers include abortion coverage in their employee health

…