After 21 years as a private practitioner/litigator and eight runs for public office (five of which were for judicial office), I was finally elected to the Supreme Court of the State of New York on my ninth try in 1998. For the next nearly 10 years, I had the privilege of serving as a trial justice in the Matrimonial Part and mostly in the Commercial Division. The last 13 years of my tenure as a judge were spent as an Associate Justice of the Appellate Division for the Second Judicial Department—the busiest appellate court in New York, the United States and, perhaps even, the world.