This week the state Senate met for a special and rare summer session, primarily to confirm six new superior court judges as New Jersey faces a mounting and unprecedented level of judicial vacancies. Many agree the vacancy rate has risen to crisis level. Three unfilled positions remain on the state Supreme Court.
A number of judicial nominees have been submitted by Gov. Phil Murphy but are still going through the vetting process, largely steered by Senate President Nick Scutari. In an interview with NJ Spotlight News, Scutari said, “You’re using overall vacancy numbers but it fails to show that we have twenty extra judges on those books that we didn’t have just about five years ago. So you have to take twenty judgeships off of the vacancy list in order to make it a fair number that we’re looking at to compare from year to year, decade to decade. People say we have a record number of vacancies but the truth of it is we actually have a record number of judges on the bench.”
“I can tell you that as the head of the Senate Judiciary committee for a dozen years and now the president of the Senate, we can only consider nominations that are made. We can’t initiate nominations,” Scutari said. “So, we’re vetting them as quickly as we get them.” Furthermore, he said, “There are a variety of reasons that people are not on the agenda just yet but it’s not an extraordinary number. And you got a variety of different factors that are slowing the process up and I think you’ve got to ask the executive branch as well. But I can tell you that our process is moving quickly and we are moving as quickly as we can to put people that are qualified on the bench, because generally they are there for life.”
