New Jersey State Bar Association President Tim McGoughran says the state is finally seating more Superior Court judges, filling vacancies on the bench that caused backlogs so severe that New Jersey’s chief justice froze civil and matrimonial trials in several counties a year ago.
“We’re getting where we should be, and I think the court systems are getting a lot more normalized now,” McGoughran said, adding that on Monday, Chief Justice Stuart Rabner lifted the moratorium for Hunterdon, Somerset and Warren counties.
“They’ve got four new judges there that they desperately needed to do the work in the family part in the civil division,” he said. “It seems like everybody’s really working hard to try to get this done. It’s just getting it over the finish line.”
Sen. Jon Bramnick (R-Union) said he knows what moved the needle — “I think once you close the courts and people can’t get before a judge, that’s probably going to light a fire.” Bramnick recalls March, 2023, when New Jersey had a 67-judge shortage. It’s now down to 48 vacancies, with six more judges — mostly from Bergen County — up for confirmation before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and another 10 to 15 being vetted.
If nominations in the pipeline get approved, the number of judicial vacancies will drop to 25 -30.
Passaic County is the only county still under a moratorium for civil and matrimonial cases.
“The children are the ones that suffer the most,” said Passaic Bar Association President-Elect Toni Belford Damiano, who also serves as a municipal court judge. “They continue to live in these dysfunctional families who have made it a priority to end the relationship and there just doesn’t seem any end in sight because it dominoes; each case filed now gets behind the other thousands that were filed before it.”
“They’re having to put their children in therapy solely as a result of all of these delays,” said attorney Marisa Baker. “… it’s not fair to these families who are already under such high stress.”
