Susan Phillips Read announced Tuesday that she will resign on Aug. 24 after serving more than 12 years as associate judge on the state Court of Appeals.

Read said in a brief letter to Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman that it had been “both a privilege and a pleasure” to serve on the court. She noted that her tenure had been almost evenly divided between the chief judgeships of Judith Kaye and, since early 2009, of Lippman.

Read, 67, will end her time on the court a little more than 16 months early. The 14-year term to which she was appointed in January 2003 by then-Gov. George Pataki runs through Jan. 5, 2017.
However, she had indicated that she probably would step down earlier, telling friends and colleagues in recent months that she made a promise to her husband, Howard John Read, that she would leave at the conclusion of the court’s 2014-2015 term.
The last hand-downs of the court’s September-to-July annual term are scheduled for early July.
Read said in an interview with the Law Journal Wednesday that she began last year to think about stepping down before her term ended.
“I just feel a personal need to kind of change up my work environment and my life,” she said. “I feel it [change] is invigorating. At least for me, it is important to change up my work life every so often. About a year ago, I thought, ‘Next year is probably the right time.’”
Read said her training was largely in commercial law, and she expects to return to it after leaving the court. She said her next job is likely to be with a firm in New York City but has no specific prospects at the moment.
“I am a pure product of the University of Chicago,” she said. “I learned there that the Uniform Commercial Code was a thing of beauty and I studied commercial law with the people who basically wrote Article 2 and Article 9 [of the UCC]. I want to keep my hand in that.”
Read said her goal when she joined the court, to the extent that she had one, was “to try to decide everything in a way that was legally correct or at least coherent and to carry on the tradition of the court. I have been very, very conscious of the body of written work I have done on the court, not only under my name, but also the memorandums I have written. I have tried to leave a body of work that is as well-written and clear analytically as possible.”
She added, “I am satisfied that I did the best I could.”
Read has been regarded as perhaps the court’s most conservative member. Her votes were often in line with two other Pataki appointees, Judges Eugene Pigott Jr. and Robert Smith, who also were generally regarded as being right-of-center philosophically.
Smith retired at the end of 2014, leaving Pigott and Read as the last members of the seven-member court appointed by Pataki. Pigott is scheduled to retire at the end of 2016.
Read’s impending departure creates a second opening that will be filled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Lippman turned 70 in May and must retire at the end of 2015.
Four of the current members of the court have been named by Cuomo. Lippman was picked by former Gov. David Paterson.
The Commission on Judicial Nomination is accepting applications for the chief judge’s opening and must have a list of nominees to Cuomo by Oct. 15 ( NYLJ, June 22).
The timing of the development of a list of candidates to replace Read was unclear Tuesday. Unlike the statutorily-set deadlines for an opening on the court caused by mandatory retirement, the nominating commission has more latitude to set its schedule for attracting and vetting applications for mid-term resignations and sending the governor lists of candidates.
Of the four mid-term resignations of judges since 1992 from the Court of Appeals, it has taken the commission about seven months on average to nominate replacements, according to commission personnel.
Read lives in West Sand Lake and Saratoga Springs and is the chairwoman of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
She and her husband also maintain an apartment in Manhattan.
Read was counsel to the General Electric Co. from 1977 to 1988 and then spent six years in private practice at Bond, Schoeneck and King in Albany before being tapped by Pataki in 1995 as a deputy counsel.
Pataki appointed her to the Court of Claims in 1998—she became presiding judge of the court the following year—before nominating her for the Court of Appeals in January 2003.
The Ohio native is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.