Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced 18 new appointees to a \u201crevitalized\u201d judicial panel. Known formally as the Mayor\u2019s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, the panel has a say in who becomes a judge in the city, evaluating and recommending candidates for mayoral appointment to the criminal and family courts, as well as interim appointments to civil courts. Established by Ed Koch in 1978 by executive order\u2014before then, judges were appointed by the mayors themselves, who would often prize political alignment over professional qualifications\u2014the panel is a key player in shaping New York City\u2019s justice system.<\/p>\n
Two facts about Mamdani\u2019s picks drew immediate comment. First, there were no Jews<\/a>. Second, the picks leaned heavily progressive<\/a> in their judicial outlook.<\/p>\n Finally, a reason to check your email.<\/p>\n Sign up for our free newsletter today.<\/p>\n The former fact, Mamdani insists<\/a>, was not by design. The latter doubtless was. Several panel members have extensive histories of advancing progressive criminal-justice reforms, prison abolition, alternatives to policing, and various forms of decriminalization. For Mamdani, who bucked the Democratic Socialists of America by publicly distancing himself from the \u201cdefund the police\u201d platform, his judicial panel picks suggest a pivot back toward his progressive roots.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mayor plainly has a litmus test for his legal appointments: Jewish lawyers aren\u2019t welcome, but the door is wide open for advocates for the most violent radicals,\u201d the New York Post editorial board said<\/a> of the judicial panel.<\/p>\n Under the guidance of Mamdani\u2019s top legal advisor, Ramzi Kassem, the administration framed the judicial panel selections as representing \u201cthe full breadth of the legal community,\u201d including individuals with backgrounds in public defense, criminal-justice reform, and indigent legal services. But a review of past lectures, podcast appearances, and writings by five of the panel\u2019s new members\u2014Julia Hernandez, Amber Baylor, Jared Trujillo, Jill Soffiyah Elijah, and Martin LaFalce\u2014suggests that the mayor is seeking to push the courts toward abolitionist and decarceral strategies.<\/p>\n An outspoken critic of family courts, Julia Hernandez,a law professor and co-director of CUNY\u2019s Family Defense Practicum and Clinic<\/a>, views the broader American child-welfare system\u2014progressives like her often refer to it as the \u201cfamily-policing system\u201d\u2014as \u201ca way to control and terrorize politically marginalized communities.\u201d She favors abolishing the system entirely, which she believes is enmeshed in the \u201cweb of racial capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFamily policing has always served capitalist interests along racial lines, combining the financial imperatives of markets with the moral imprimatur of saving children from their own families,\u201d Hernandez wrote<\/a> in a 2022 post coauthored with CUNY law professor Tarek Z. Ismail, also codirector of the Family Defense Clinic<\/p>\n Hernandez is an outspoken proponent of \u201cmovement lawyering,\u201d a practice<\/a> where attorneys are not merely their clients\u2019 legal representatives but also agents of social change seeking to \u201cdismantle architectures of subordination.\u201d In line with this, she has called<\/a> for lawyers to practice \u201cradical early defense,\u201d giving families representation at the onset of an interaction with the child-welfare system, well before a case could advance to family court, with the goal of \u201crestricting or eliminating the state\u2019s coercive encroachment into a family\u2019s life.\u201d She also criticizes traditional legal services as being \u201cdivorced from a larger movement\u201d and New York City\u2019s Administration for Children\u2019s Services as an example<\/a> of \u201ca centuries-old government practice that terrorizes Black and Latino families by taking their children.\u201d<\/p>\n The Mamdani administration\u2019s announcement<\/a> praised Hernandez for challenging \u201cgovernment surveillance and the separation of families of color and advocates for policies that support family well-being,\u201d as well as her prior work as a family and immigration attorney.<\/p>\n Amber Baylor, a public defender turned law professor and founding director of Columbia Law School\u2019s Criminal Defense Clinic, has called for schools to decriminalize student discipline by adopting<\/a> a \u201cretroactive and reparations-based redress for the criminalization of students.\u201d Utilizing a reparations framework, which she argues \u201creposition[s] moral norms,\u201d would expunge records and affirmatively reform the deeper harms of punitive state policies\u2014and thereby serve as a \u201crestoration of stolen opportunity.\u201d Baylor is an adherent<\/a> of critical race theory in legal education, which allows students to interpret the judicial system through a systemic racial lens.<\/p>\n Jared Trujillo, a CUNY law professor teaching constitutional law and critical race theory, among other subjects, previously served as a senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union and president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. He argues<\/a> that the current criminal legal system is, at its very foundation, \u201ca continuation of slavery\u201d that requires not piecemeal reform but radical alternatives to incarceration and other forms of punishment.<\/p>\n A former \u201csex worker<\/a>,\u201d Trujillo has been a staunch advocate for the decriminalization of consensual prostitution. \u201cOne of the biggest offenses that I see people arrested for is penal law 240.37, loitering for the purpose of prostitution . . . oftentimes women of color [and] far too often transgender women or non-binary folks,\u201d he said in a 2019 video<\/a>. \u201cAnd they\u2019re just existing. They\u2019re waiting for a bus. They\u2019re smoking a cigarette. These folks are picked up. They\u2019re arrested. They\u2019re booked, which can be incredibly humiliating.\u201d<\/p>\n Trujillo has also argued against lengthy prison sentences, which he claims perpetuate multigenerational poverty, and he views<\/a> mandatory minimum sentences as \u201cthe real culprit for mass incarceration in the United States today,\u201d which prosecutors \u201cweaponize\u201d to coerce plea deals. He argues that sentencing reform and shorter sentences can reduce multigenerational poverty.<\/p>\n Jill Soffiyah Elijah, founder and former Executive Director of the Alliance of Families for Justice, is arguably the most prominent figure in the prison abolition movement to be included in the new judicial panel. She has argued<\/a> that \u201cwe need a lobotomy of the American psyche, so that we shift from thinking that we\u2019re better if some people are worse off.\u201d She views<\/a> the average American as \u201caddicted to punishment\u201d and believes the carceral system makes punishment \u201cas humiliating as possible to destroy people.\u201d Elijah believes that the movement needs<\/a> to \u201ccompletely abolish prisons,\u201d which she likens<\/a> to \u201cweapons of mass destruction,\u201d as irredeemable as slavery.<\/p>\n Elijah has represented and publicly championed incarcerated members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, sentenced to death in 1982<\/a> for killing a Philadelphia police officer, whom she has called<\/a> a \u201csheer genius\u201d and a \u201cpolitical prisoner.\u201d She was an outspoken advocate<\/a> of Sundiata Acoli, a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1973 murder of two people, including a New Jersey state trooper. She also served as a \u201clegal advisor<\/a>\u201d for the Venceremos Brigade, has made<\/a> more than 90 trips to Cuba, and claims that the criminal-justice system in Cuba is preferable<\/a> to the \u201cclassic American approach.\u201d<\/p>\n Martin J. LaFalce, a law professor and director of the Defense and Advocacy Clinic at St. John\u2019s University School of Law, spent<\/a> 14 years at the Legal Aid Society. The Mamdani administration lauded him for his work representing clients at Rikers Island charged with parole violations.<\/p>\n The son of New York Congressman John LaFalce, he served on the legal team for Naeem Davis, a homeless man charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in 2012 for pushing Ki-Suck Han into the path of an oncoming subway train following an argument. Davis was acquitted in 2017 after jurors ruled he had acted in self-defense.<\/p>\n LaFalce was one of more than 80 law professors who signed a letter<\/a> opposing New York Governor Kathy Hochul\u2019s proposed rollbacks of 2020 discovery reforms<\/a>. The letter argued that scrapping the reforms would give prosecutors an unfair advantage and \u201creverse the progress New York has made towards transparency,\u201d returning the state \u201cto an era where guilty pleas were secured by coercion, not evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n Yale Law Professor Issa Kohler-Hausmann, author of\u00a0Misdemeanorland<\/a>, a 2019 book that scrutinized\u00a0Broken Windows theory<\/a> and argued that the \u201clower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance,\u201d credited LaFalce as her in-house research expert for the book.<\/p>\n Few, if any, mayoral judicial committees have attracted this much scrutiny or are as skeptical of the criminal-justice system as Mamdani\u2019s judicial panel. If their past statements are any indication, the future of New York City\u2019s court system may soon be ruled over by judges who, like the advisors who recommended them, are more committed to changing the courts than they are to the rule of law. Mamdani may have softened his \u201cdefund the police\u201d rhetoric since taking office, but he appears to be letting his judicial panel do the talking for him.<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note: An earlier version of this article identified Issa Kohler-Hausmann as Martin LaFalce\u2019s wife. The text has been corrected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced 18 new appointees to a \u201crevitalized\u201d judicial panel. 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