I was excited, until I found out that the NY Supreme Court is NOT the highest court in New York. There are still two more courts above it.
That’s right. In New York, the Court of Appeals is higher than the Supreme Court.
err… so what does this mean? Is it legal in New York immediately, or pending something from a higher court?
The ruling is stayed for 30 days pending appeal.
Oy.
Assuming there’s no appeal (a very, very foolish assumption), the ruling would presumably enter into force in 30 days. The plaintiffs in this particular case would be given their licenses. More broadly, the geographic area over which this court has jurisdiction would probably begin recognizing same-sex marriages, while the parts covered by the Albany court that ruled differently last week would not.
In reality, it will probably be the job of the Court of Appeals (the highest court in the state) to reconcile the two decisions.
–Cliffy
Adding to Cliffy’s comment:
The Supreme Court in New York is the top court of “general jurisdiction” – while justice courts for towns and villages, city courts, and county courts are below them, their jurisdiction is limited. From what I saw, it serves roughly equally as the first-level appeals court from the municipal courts and as the trial court for significant cases and things left to its jurisdiction. (For example, there are caps on the amount of money that may be sued for in the municipal courts; a suit involving a sum above that amount must start in Supreme Court. All divorces are pursued in Supreme Court. “Article 78” proceedings, preventing a local official from acting beyond his legal powers or requiring one to do what the law says he must, are Supreme Court matters; I believe that the Albany and NYC cases were actually Article 78 cases.) It’s roughly equivalent to Superior Courts in many other states.
There is conceptually one Supreme Court for the entire state, but its justices sit individually in each county seat. The Supreme Court also has an Appellate Division, geographically divided into four “departments,” to which Supreme Court cases are appealed. The application as precedent of a Supreme Court case is, apparently according to Cliffy’s post, limited to the department in which it was heard – so cases in eastern Upstate New York would follow the Albany precedent and cases in the NYC metropolitan area would follow the Manhattan precedent. The single Court of Appeals, which sits in Albany, is the court of last resort, the supreme court in fact if not in name. And it’s a sucker bet that they will be hearing these cases in the quite near future.
The judge’s stay of the ruling for 30 days is a bit of a procedural trick that means that the ruling will be stayed until at least the Appellate Division, New York’s intermediate appellate court, and most likely the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, decides the matter.
Under New York law, a party has 30 days to file a notice of appeal from an appealable court order (which this is). Under New York CPLR 5519(a)(1), where a state governmental entity or officer appeals, the order or judgment appealed from is stayed unless the appellate court modifies or dissolves the stay.
Here, the defendant is the New York City Clerk, so when he appeals the ruling, it will automatically be stayed, preserving the status quo – that same sex couples cannot marry. It is unlikely that an appellate court would lift the stay prior to its final decision.
In other words, like most of the other same sex marriage cases around the country, actual permission to marry will not occur until the case winds its way through the whole state court system.