Judge Matthew J. Jasen.

• Author: Pigott, Eugene F., Jr.
• Position: Symposium: Judges on Judges: The New York State Court of Appeals Judges' Own Favorites in Court History - Testimonial

I intend to aim my remarks at the students here, saying to my colleagues as I was listening to each one of these really great stories, that some of you may be talking about some of us one of these days, because we couldn't talk about any living Judge, obviously not our own colleagues.

Judge Jones and I are not even in Judge Rosenblatt's book; we're judge pocket part, and we aspire to that someday. And in conference, when I first got appointed to the Court and Ted joined us not too long after, I said to my wife, I said, you know, at conference, you know, I've got Judge Smith to my right and Judge Jones to my left. And she says, what are you, in the witness protection program? And because we couldn't do any research on our colleagues, I cannot tell you that Judge Smith and Judge Jones, that those are the real names, but I'm going to assume that they are and that everything you see here is true.

I do want to thank the Albany Law Review and the Albany Law School for having us here, and Vin Bonventre for inviting me. I have him down here twice because Vin was one of the law clerks for Judge Matt Jasen, about whom I'm about to speak, as was Mike Hutter, Mike Powers, John Halloran. A true cavalcade of great legal minds that Matt Jasen was very quick to credit for much of what he had done.

But I'm going to, I want to divide this up in very short order, to tell you about Judge Jasen's pre-law days, his days before the Court of Appeals, and then talk about a few of his writings. And I'll be brief about each, but I think each one of them, and the general picture you're going to get is an extremely principled individual whose principles were imbued in him very, very early.

I went to see Judge Jasen a few years ago. He was going to talk to the Appellate Division, Fourth Department, the new lawyers who were being sworn in, and I wanted to talk to him about the venue and what he would be saying, and, in his office, he had two pictures on the wall; one of the pictures was a picture of him being thrown in the air by French soldiers because he had been part of the American Army that liberated France, and they were the first ones to this one area in France where these French soldiers had been held as prisoners of war. And they shot off the locks, and they went in, and of course, the French soldiers were so gratified to see them that they took Lieutenant Jasen, and they were throwing him in the air. And a photographer, a British photographer for Life Magazine took a picture of that, and it was in Life. And, Matt said, "That was about as close to getting injured during the war as I ever was." I thought they were going to drop me.

The other picture he had was a picture of the Bishop of Cracow, Poland, and Matt was very proud of his Polish heritage, very proud of his Roman Catholic religion. And he had worked on having the Bishop come to Buffalo for certain ceremonies, and the Bishop by then was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II. And in two very interesting snapshots in his life that he had on his wall, you got a sense of what made Judge Jasen, Matt Jasen...