“I am ready, and I am able,” Justice Tanya R. Kennedy announced to a throng of admirers in the New York County Courthouse rotunda last Thursday evening. Kennedy had just been sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court of the state of New York. “You see, an ordinary person can do extraordinary things, and I am an ordinary person.”
Kennedy’s humility is one thing, but the parade of praise that preceded her at the podium took her out of the ordinary and placed her securely in the sublime. “I am so grateful for the opportunities you gave me,” said Servet N. Bayimli, who interned for Kennedy while he was a junior at their alma mater, Brooklyn Tech High School. He recalled that as a 19-year-old, he was part of the school’s Law and Society Major Summer Internship Program.
After Brian Nesby and pianist Dr. Gregory Hopkins presented their rendition of “He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands” and invocation prayer by the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, the evening of recognition for the incoming justice was left in the hands of co-moderators Council Member Inez Dickens and Justice George Silver, who navigated the 90 minutes smoothly.
Practically every lawyer in the city and a coterie of judges and notables filled the rotunda. “They even got them hanging out of the rafters,” Assemblyman Keith Wright remarked after heaping his glorious words on the justice. A mere listing of the speakers alone is quite impressive: Justice Fern A. Fisher, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Judge Lisa Walsh, Justice Peter H. Multon, Dean Matthew Miller and Dean Melanie Leslie of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. She noted that she graduated from Cardozo a year before Kennedy in 1991.
The confluence of their days in law school is perhaps a good place as any to recount just a portion of Kennedy’s resume, which began “ordinarily,” she might say, in the Bronx with the early love and guidance of her mother, Eleanor Kennedy. As Bayimli observed, she attended Brooklyn Tech and then Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1989. After receiving her law degree from Cardozo, she began her career working in the Office of the Corporation Counsel for the New York City Law Department.
In the city’s law department, Kennedy acted as an assistant corporation counsel for seven years and deputy assistant chief from 1997 to 1999. From this plateau of prominence, she took another step up the juridical ladder to become a principal law clerk for now retired State Supreme Court Justice Barry Cozier. Cozier recounted a few of those splendid moments before administering the oath. Ever since their first working arrangement, the two have been inseparable, and when he was promoted to the Appellate Division, she remained by his side.
But they were never more together than during this momentous occasion, with Kennedy’s hand in the air and her heart probably soaring to join the spectacular mural in the rotunda’s dome.
Throughout the evening, Kennedy turned from her seat to greet friends. A lucky few were even recipients of hugs, such as writer and photographer Marc Rasbury.
The program was chock full of friends and associates, including Sylvia Alston, who has been steadfast in her support of the justice; Yvonne DuBose; Ron Grant, whose version of “If I Can Help Somebody,” could be Kennedy’s theme song, given the hundreds she has ushered along to success.
And those are just a few of the extraordinary things from a most ordinary person.