For the third time since 2021, career public-interest lawyer Corey Stoughton is up for consideration for a seat on the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court.

Stoughton remains an option for Gov. Kathy Hochul to appoint as chief judge, after the New York Senate's historic turnback of her appointment of Justice Hector LaSalle on Feb. 15.

Stoughton had also made the Commission on Judicial Nominations' shortlist for an associate judgeship in 2021. But Hochul picked Judge Shirley Troutman.

Stoughton has been head of special litigation for the Legal Aid Society since January 2020. She led a team that successfully argued for the release of hundreds of prisoners from New York City jails amid the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. Stoughton herself argued a mass writ that resulted in the release of about 110 prisoners who were locked up on noncriminal, technical parole violations.

Prior to joining Legal Aid, she spent three years at Liberty, a domestic human rights organization in London. Her final year was as its acting executive director.

She has also served as special counsel in President Barack Obama's administration.

A senior supervising attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union for 10 years, Stoughton became best known in that role for serving as lead counsel in the Hurrell-Harring v. State of New York settlement for which she and a team of dozens of lawyers at Schulte Roth & Zabel were able to set funding and caseload standards for public defender organizations in New York State.

That right-to-counsel challenge to New York's public defense system, which was focused on upstate, argued that the state had abdicated its responsibility for those systems to the counties, which didn't have the tax base to support that burden, and weren't doing a good job of it.

It led to the creation of the state Office of Indigent Legal Services. The final settlement resulted in tens of millions of dollars in state money devoted to the system and, later on, legislators expanded the system to hundreds of millions of dollars to broaden the funding beyond the five counties that were the focus of the lawsuit.

Stephen J. Acquario, executive director and general counsel for the New York State Association of Counties and the New York State County Executives Association, opposed Stoughton in the landmark settlement case.

"It was extremely tense between the parties," Acquario recalled. "We were literally on opposite sides of the table, but both shared the commitment to civil rights, legal services for the poor, and pro bono access to justice. That was the common ground that we ultimately found between the parties, and the avenue for a way to bring about a resolution."

"Instead of yelling at each other, or taking adversarial actions against each other, or further litigation against each other—there was a way for us to find a common ground," he said.

"It was unconscionable that at arraignment individuals lacked counsel to the poor. It was unconscionable for individuals to go through an adversarial criminal proceeding without effective assistance of counsel, especially for the poor. And so having this access to justice brought us together in a way that we were ultimately able to come up with a resolution that really has stood the test of time for eight years," Acquario said.

During settlement talks, Acquario said Stoughton's experiences working for the Obama administration and experience with the NYCLU came to the fore. He said he came away impressed with her understanding of the complexities of government and ability to listen to the concerns of local government attorneys and administrators who'd be responsible for the public defender program.

"Through patience and reason, we came to work out an agreement and just established unprecedented historic caseload standards and improved the assistance of counsel for the defendants… It was really quite a journey to get to where we needed to get to, but I was really impressed with her."

Stoughton, a resident of Brooklyn, declined to be interviewed.

She is the only attorney in her family, and she has said that everything she knew about lawyering while growing up was from watching the longtime NBC series "Law & Order."

Lindsay Harrison, a partner in Jenner & Block's Washington, D.C., office, and a classmate of Stoughton's at Harvard Law School, told the Law Journal in November that Stoughton "would be viewed as someone who's an honest broker, someone who's looking to protect the credibility of the court, as well as to make every single person in the state of New York feel like they have a fair shot while they're in court."

During the same Law Journal profile of Stoughton, Christopher Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called Stoughton "extraordinary, and exactly the sort of person who should be on the Court of Appeals.

During the search that led to Hochul's appointment of Troutman, a former midlevel appeals court judge from western New York with a prosecutorial background for the high court, 10 members of the Democratic-controlled Senate wrote to the governor requesting that she nominate a public-interest lawyer to fill the vacancy. Lawmakers singled out Stoughton and another public defender.

Acquario said he believes Stoughton is deserving of being appointed to the Court of Appeals as either a chief judge or associate judge.

He said he believes that the governor's program bill that would allow her to pick two judges for the Court of Appeals from the current shortlist "makes sense," and he said he's hopeful the legislature passes it.

But Acquario said he considers Stoughton a longshot of being picked by the governor, considering she's already had two opportunities to do so.

"I do think that she is swimming up the Niagara River here… because she has appeared on a number of lists and did not appear to be the decision of the governor," Acquario said.

"There is a consensus of attorneys, though, of her peers, who do believe that she should have this job and that she should be considered for this job and that is the commission and the attorneys who nominated her on more than one occasion. And so, while I am, of course, extremely supportive of her being chosen by the governor here as a nominee, I'm not the only one."

Acquario said Hochul and the Senate "stand in this position of predicting who that person might become in the future and weighing this destiny with their own values. And to do this evaluation, they look at prior decisions and prior employment and to make that calculus of getting their consent to this or nomination to or consent to."

"I think that this individual (Stoughton) has that trajectory of jurisprudence that would benefit New York, that would represent all of us in a fair, impartial way. And I think that she should be given due consideration for this position. She brings a great deal of balance to the court."

Editor's Note: This profile is updated from a story that was previously published in December 2022.