This judicial session New York State Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals Rowan D. Wilson, 62, has put in a lot of work in Albany to get the courts on track after his confirmation hearing in April. Wilson was Gov. Kathy Hochul’s second nominee after the Senate Judiciary Committee spectacularly rejected her first nominee.
Wilson talks with Amsterdam News about his upbringing, what his life’s been like since thrust into the limelight as the state’s first Black chief judge, what he hopes to accomplish, and weighs in on upcoming U.S. Supreme Court cases challenging affirmative action.
Wilson views his job as more of a public policy role that shapes the state’s laws. “What are the ways in which the court system can be improved to better meet the needs of the people who appear in the courts or would like to appear in the courts but can’t or don’t,” said Wilson.
While in Albany, he said that his days are frequently very long, ranging from 7 a.m. to well after midnight. A lot of his time is spent conferring with law clerks, reading, writing and editing. “It’s very different from what a trial judge would have as a day-to-day,” said Wilson about his current workload.
When he’s in New York City, he attends events, networks, and tries to be as accessible as possible without “jeopardizing substantive work.” At home at his residence in Harlem, Wilson prefers to focus on family. His three daughters inspire him to be involved in the community and givebacks.
Wilson is a booknerd at heart, but due to the nature of his work, he doesn’t get to read much for fun. His favorite authors include Toni Morrison, Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens.
This being a historic position, Wilson said he thinks about the impact his nomination has on Black and brown New Yorkers and even other judges all the time. In this last month, he was often approached by court attorneys, lawyers, and law students happy about his barrier breaking position. “I realize that this is a great opportunity with historical significance,” said Wilson.
To address the administrative and case backlog that piled up while the chief judgeship was vacant, Wilson said the court office has done a lot of reorganizing in the month. He projects that the cases that were held up should be reargued and handled by this October.
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“We’re trying to work with the legislature now to get more family court judges and get more support and resources because there’s a shortage there,” said Wilson.
Wilson is a California native. He was born in a suburb east of Los Angeles called Pomona. Both of his parents were school teachers. Wilson said the smog that hung over the area his family lived in was so bad that often his mother couldn’t speak. Doctors at the time told her it wasn’t a health risk but that they should move to a neighborhood with better air quality. Wilson’s family made the move north to Berkeley, California near San Francisco Bay when he was about seven.
When he was really little, he thought about becoming an architect. “But I found out that I could not draw. Not at all, I mean anything,” said Wilson. “I can’t even write in script.” Later on as a pre-teen, he saw himself becoming a doctor but during a visit to a medical school he fell ill after watching medical students cutting open human cadavers.
Berkeley was a community where everyone was interested in politics, government, social issues, and free speech, said Wilson. In 1968, Wilson remembers the school district “desegregating” the schools in Berkeley, which had large Black, Latino, Asian, and white populations. That was partly the inspiration behind his foray into law. The other was due to a ninth grade English teacher. Wilson didn’t want to give an oral report in front of the class. His teacher offered to excuse him under the condition that he’d return after the summer to say why he didn’t want to do it.
“I took the deal and I went back to see him before the start of my tenth grade,” said Wilson, “and said that ‘I thought about it and I was afraid that people would think what I was saying was stupid or they would make fun of me.’ I realized that was not rational but it was what I was feeling and what I decided to do was join the speech and debate team in high school.”
From there, Wilson participated in extemporaneous speaking, model U.N., model Congress, and other civic engagement projects. Many of the topics were law-related, but funnily enough, Wilson didn’t want to be a practicing lawyer. He didn’t imagine himself going away to Harvard for college either.
“My mom wanted me to go away for college,” said Wilson. “She wanted me to go there and said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity even though I didn’t want to go.”
His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer while he was in high school. By the time he got to college, he said, he was unhappy and depressed at that time. She died around his sophomore year at Harvard Law School. He graduated in 1984, aiming to be a law professor.
Worried about paying off school loans, Wilson headed to New York for private practice at the Cravath, Swaine & Moore law firm. By 1992, as an interesting foreshadowing to his current role, Wilson became the firm’s first “partner of color of any kind.”
“It was reputed to be the very hardest place to become a partner at,” said Wilon. “For me, I was kind of minding my own business, doing my work and still sort of thinking I wanted to be a law professor some day.”
A vacancy for associate judge opened up on the Court of Appeals under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Wilson said a friend goaded him into applying. He ended up applying six times for six different vacancies over the next five years. To this day, he said he has no idea why he made the list or why he was finally chosen. As for Hochul’s nomination, Wilson said he was “surprised” that he and his colleagues weren’t on the first shortlist because they were already sitting judges by then. After the rejection of Judge Hector D. LaSalle, Wilson said that he didn’t exactly think he was the favorite to be nominated.
“I had a blast at the confirmation hearing, what could be better than having people question you about work you’ve done and things you’ve written,” said Wilson, clearly not unnerved by the media attention.
Wilson faced his fair share of criticism for some of his opinions during the hearing. In 2009, he wrote a majority opinion for People v. Regan, an alleged rape case that was reversed because the due process clause was violated. In 2018, he wrote a dissenting opinion for People v. Tiger, a wrongful conviction case where the defendant had already pled guilty to assault and endangering a child when it was later discovered she was innocent.
Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to rule on cases this June challenging the use of affirmative action and “race-conscious admissions” at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions Inc. According to Temple University, there have been at least five Supreme Court cases against affirmative action since 1978.
Given its conservative streak and majority, it’s widely believed that the Supreme Court will vote down affirmative action laws in colleges––and eventually the workplace.
“If you start in the 1970s and moved up until today, it’s sort of tightened and tightened the circumstances under which it’s permissible to take race or ethnicity or other classifications into account in making various types of decisions,” said Wilson, “whether it’s education or employment or so on. I think even with the substantial tightening they’ve done over the years, they’ve never said ‘you absolutely cannot do this.’”
Wilson thinks that even at its most conservative the Supreme Court has seen how “appropriate and useful” diversity is.
In 2002 for the Grutter v. Bollinger case, Wilson wrote an amicus brief for the American Bar Association (ABA) in defense of the University of Michigan School of Law’s program using race as a factor in the admission of students. He said his own views aligned pretty well with the ABA.
Wilson, like many others, can’t definitively say that affirmative action has played a role in his career, partnerships, clerkships, and nominations. When it came to Hochul’s choice, she at least appeared very intentional about choosing a Black or brown judge to fill the vacancy for chief judge.
“I don’t know, it might’ve,” said Wilson. “I have guesses about some of that.”
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.