In 1983, Governor Mario Cuomo kept a promise: appointing, for the first time, a woman to serve on the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. Cuomo called Kaye, then 45, “a lawyer of unusual ability, integrity and determination.” Kaye never looked back, eventually becoming the state’s Chief Judge, serving the office longer than any of her 21 male predecessors, according to a New York Times obituary.
Judge Kaye presided over the seven-member Court of Appeals for nearly 16 years and also supervised the $2.5 billion, 16,000-employee statewide judicial system, which she modernized by making jury service more equitable and convenient and by establishing boutique courts concerned as much with problem-solving as with punishment.
In specialized courts that focused on community quandaries and on crimes involving drugs and domestic violence, New York judges now have alternatives to sending a defendant to jail, among them ordering treatment for addiction and mental illness and providing social services for victims of abuse.
Kaye served as Chief Judge until she was 70 years old, when she retired in 2008. She died of cancer in her home in Manhattan at the age of 77 on Thursday.
About six months ago, Kaye addressed the New York State Bar Association in Cooperstown, where she was given a “trailblazer” award by the NYSBA Committee on Women in the Law. In the video below, a grateful Kaye shares a short anecdote from 1983, on her very first day on the New York State Court of Appeals on September 12, 1983, and talks about the progress of women in the legal profession.
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
