Origin

• On January 2, 1896, the New York Times announced, "The judiciary of New-York [sic] State entered upon a new era yesterday." The state had ratified a new constitution in 1894 that finally took effect on the first of 1896. The new constitution partially abolished the preexisting court system. It kept the Court of Appeals as it had been, but replaced was the previous intermediate appellate court, called the General Term, which itself had been created in 1846 during the reorganization of the much older Supreme Court of Judicature. The constitution of 1896 strengthened the role of the intermediate appellate division and made a more clear distinction between it and the highest court.
  
  

Jurisdiction

• Unlike the Court of Appeals in New York, the Supreme Court, Appellate Division can make findings of both fact and law. This means it can settle disputes over the facts of a case as well as correct procedural errors of the lower courts. The Court of Appeals only makes decisions on matters of law. In addition to appeals from the Supreme Court, Surrogate's Court, Family Court and Court of Claims, the Appellate also has original jurisdiction over certain matters, including habeas corpus petitions, proceedings against particular judicial officers, review of determinations of the New York State Division of Human Rights and matters concerning the discipline of attorneys.
  
  

Structure

• The Appellate Division is composed of four coequal departments, each originally with five justices. The first presides over New York and Bronx Counties. The second, which has more than half of the state's population, contains 10 downstate counties, including Queens. The third division, geographically the largest, today contains only about one seventh of the state's population. The fourth department consists of the counties surrounding Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. If a department has not ruled on a certain issue but another has, the lower courts in the department are instructed to enforce the ruling of the other departments. When departments have conflicting rulings, the lower courts within the department must follow the ruling of their Appellate Division.
  
  

Expansion

• When the borders of the four departments were originally drawn, they were intended to have roughly equal shares of the population. In 1925, the growth in the number of cases forced a constitutional revision to increase the number of justices to seven. In 1960, the Fourth Department's annual caseload had only increased by 100 cases since its inception, to about 597 proceedings. Meanwhile, due to demographic shifts and new construction, the Second District saw a population explosion that caused it to overtake the First District in the number of cases in the mid-1960s. The number of justices in this department steadily increased until in 1981 it had swollen to its current level of 15.
  
  

Location

• The current location of the First Department, at 27 Madison Avenue in New York City, was built in 1900. In 1974 the court expanded by obtaining an adjacent building. The Second Department is housed in Brooklyn. Its current location was built in 1937, replacing its previous site at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The building in which the Third Department convenes, in Albany, was also built in 1937, but it did not house the court until 1972, after several relocations throughout the city. In Rochester, the Fourth Department has the newest facility, constructed in 1998.