Rod Serling, lit cigarette in hand, standing behind the rich-red leather seats of the First Department that await each new day's complement of judicial robes: "Submitted for your consideration: You're travelling through another dimension titled Shah v. 20 E. 64th St., 198 A.D.3d 23 (1st Dept. 2021), where property damage of a "garden variety" is anchored to a byzantine "unorthodox procedural path charted by" wondrous legal minds, pursuant to which the parties agreed to a trifurcated trial to be conducted in two phases wherein plaintiffs' claims are litigated under two different legal theories, tort and breach of contract: a jury to decide damages in tort, and a judge, in a parallel nonjury trial, to determine damages under breach of contract. A jury waiver clause in plaintiffs' contract with 20 East prevents the jury from hearing plaintiffs' breach of contract claims. Not surprisingly, two scathingly conflicting judgments emerge to do battle. Only the nonjury judgment is entered pursuant to court order. You've just crossed over into the dimension of procedural nightmare and madness in the finality and appealability zone."

Parties may chart their own procedural courses which a court is bound to follow. Hovering over this case like a menacing alien spacecraft in a sci-fi film is settled law that: (1) "Where all parties to a litigation choose to do so, they may to a large extent chart their own procedural course through the courts," Stevenson v. News Syndicate Co., 302 NY 81, 87 (1950); and (2) "Parties by their stipulations may in many ways make the law for any legal proceeding to which they are parties, which not only bind them but which the courts are bound to enforce. They may stipulate away statutory, and even constitutional rights," Matter of Mallory, 278 NY 429, 433 (1938)." However, once so stipulated parties must bear the consequences. Parenthetically, "parties to a civil litigation, in the absence of a strong countervailing public policy, may [even] consent, formally or by their conduct, to the law to be applied, e.g., Brady v. Nally, 151 N.Y. 258, 264 …" Martin v. City of Cohoes, 37 N.Y.2d 162, 165-66 (1975).