What is the rule, if any, for the authority that a decision of one of the four New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division courts holds for the other three?
Award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Neil Gaiman’s quip about how “Google will bring you back 100 million answers. A librarian will bring you back the correct one” may have caught the attention of the public, but it shows a basic ignorance of what librarians do. A librarian does not know the right answer and is not supposed to know the right answer – and in fact, library science research has consistently found that only about 55% of answers provided by reference librarians in response to users’ questions are “correct.” A good overview of the research can be found in David A. Tyckoson, Wrong Questions, Wrong Answers: Behavioral vs. Factual Evaluation of Reference Service, in Assessment and Accountability in Reference Work (Susan Griswold Blandy et al. eds., 1992).
What a good librarian does, on the other hand, is know where to find an answer that is backed by the weight of authority.
A key concept in the American legal system is the idea of controlling authority. Lower-level courts, whether federal or state, must follow the precedent set by a higher-level court. At the state level, decisions of the New York Court of Appeals are controlling authority for the various New York state trial courts and for the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division.
However, what is the rule, if any, for the authority that a decision of one of the four Appellate Division courts holds for the other three?
One answer to this question is found in William H. Manz, Gibson’s New York Legal Research Guide, at 183-184 (3d ed. 2004), in the section entitled “Overview of Mandatory Authority in New York”.
“The decisions of the various judicial departments are persuasive authority as to each other. For example, a Second Department decision is merely persuasive authority for the Third Department.”
This is an answer, but is it a sufficient answer? It does not provide any citations to caselaw, and overall, a legal research manual may not be considered as good a source as an established treatise.
Looking at this question further, the best answer to the question of controlling authority in New York appellate courts, with a citation to a relevant court case, can be found in 1 A. Vincent Buzzard, New York Appellate Practice, § 7.05[6][C], at 7-50.
“The individual departments may reach contrary results, but they may also accept each other’s decision as persuasive.”
And If you are interested in a more in-depth discussion of issues surrounding legal authority, you can read William & Mary Law School reference librarian Benjamin J. Keele’s Splitting Hairs: What Subtle Distinctions Teach Us About Authority, the cover article in the December 2012 issue of AALL Spectrum, the official magazine of the American Association of Law Libraries.