NYC Restores 48-Year-Old Bar Association Role in Picking Judges

New York City's Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary has signed a new memorandum of understanding with the New York City Bar Association's judiciary committee, formally restoring an outside vetting role for the city's judicial nominees that had been cut off under former Mayor Eric Adams. The agreement revives a practice dating back roughly half a century, in which the City Bar conducts questionnaires, interviews, and legal reviews of candidates under consideration and passes ratings and feedback to the mayor's committee before any nominee reaches the bench.

The deal, first reported by amNewYork, formalizes a process for sharing resources between the two bodies and states that their shared mission is to promote a fair, rigorous, confidential, and efficient judicial screening process. The Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, known as MACJ, evaluates candidates for judgeships in the city's Family and Criminal courts and also reviews interim candidates for the Civil Courts, while the mayor retains the ultimate power to appoint recommended candidates to the bench. Under New York law, the mayor directly appoints roughly one-third of all judicial seats across the five boroughs, according to CUNY School of Law.

A Custom Broken, Then Rebuilt

The arrangement traces back to 1978, when Mayor Ed Koch established MACJ and city mayors began pledging to appoint judges only from candidates approved by both the committee and the City Bar, a dual-vetting custom that persisted across administrations for decades, per the Fund for Modern Courts. Mayor Rudy Giuliani reportedly forwent the City Bar's judicial recommendations at one point, and Mayor Eric Adams cut the partnership again in early 2025, excluding the organization from candidate evaluations after having initially maintained the protocol through his own Executive Order 14 in 2022. Adams reportedly relied more heavily on county bar associations after severing ties with the City Bar.

Mamdani moved to undo that break almost immediately after taking office, signing Executive Order 6 on January 2, which revoked Adams' Executive Order 14 and directed MACJ to publish demographic data on judicial applicant pools and build a searchable public database of appointments, according to the NYC Mayor's Office. The order also mandated that committee recruitment include attorneys from public defense, family court child and parent representation, and indigent legal services, broadening a panel that had traditionally leaned toward prosecutors.

New Committee, New Chair

Mamdani and senior court officials appointed an 18-member panel to MACJ in July, naming civil rights attorney Ali Najmi as chair after the body had been left largely vacant near the end of the Adams administration, the Queens Daily Eagle reported. Najmi had planned to restore the partnership with the City Bar, and the new memorandum makes good on that goal by formalizing a process for sharing resources between the committee and the bar association's judiciary committee. Under the agreement, MACJ considers the City Bar's ratings, evaluations, and supporting feedback when recommending candidates, and the City Bar limits its judicial election recommendations to simple approved or not approved ratings, which it posts publicly.

Both organizations have agreed to keep shared candidate materials confidential, though the City Bar may share information about MACJ candidates with the five borough-based bar associations, which provide their own additional evaluation. Notably, individual candidate participation in the City Bar's screening process remains voluntary rather than mandatory, a caveat that could limit how comprehensive the review ends up being for every nominee.

Legal Community Reaction

City University of New York law professor Ramzi Kassem wrote that the Mamdani administration is bringing an independent perspective back into judicial candidate evaluation while preserving MACJ's own independent judgment. Fordham Law dean Matthew Diller also welcomed the restored partnership. The City Bar, which has more than 20,000 members, has long described its role as conducting an independent, rigorous, and non-partisan review of judicial candidates.

Watchdog groups have flagged tensions embedded in Mamdani's broader executive order that underpins this restoration. Scrutinize and Reinvent Albany noted in January that while Executive Order 6 enhanced pipeline transparency, it also removed for-cause removal protections for committee members, meaning members now serve at the pleasure of the mayor rather than under stronger tenure guarantees. The order did extend committee members' terms from two years to four, a change intended to provide greater institutional continuity across mayoral administrations.

Recent Appointments Under the New Process

Mamdani made his first judicial moves in January, nominating three new judges — Cary Fischer, Natalie Barros, and Andrés Casas — and reappointing nine sitting judges across the city's Criminal and Family courts, as Hoodline first reported. That slate arrived under the same executive order framework that now underlies the restored City Bar partnership, tying the administration's early personnel decisions to the broader vetting overhaul it has pursued all year, including the July appointment of the reconstituted advisory committee itself.