Federal Judiciary

HASTY JUSTICE
By Mark Thompson
markthomp@yahoo.com
Posted 03-05-08

New York County Justice Richard B. Lowe III keeps getting reversed for too quickly jumping to conclusions about complicated disputes that, according to the Appellate Division, are not quite as easy to untangle as the judge would like to think.

In the most recent such case, Lowe, who sits on the Commercial Part, the court unit that handles complex commercial litigation, decided that since Con Edison had not removed wires from a construction site, the utility was liable to the contractor for breaching its common-law duty to relocate overhead wires that are interfering with a public works project. In fact, said the Appellate Division, Con Edison’s response to the suit demonstrated that the utility had a reasonable explanation for its conduct. Indeed, in numerous locations where wires were supposedly getting in the way, the work had already been completed before orders to relocate the wires were issued, the utility asserted. Yet without bothering to hear Con Edison out, Lowe “improperly inferred disinterested malevolence, as a matter of law,” said the appellate panel, reversing his grant of summary judgment to the contractor and sending the case back to court for further proceedings. DeMicco Brothers Inc. v. Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. (February 28)

Full post as published by Judicial Reports on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).