Sir William Blackstone explained in his Commentaries that a court of record is a court "where acts and judicial proceedings are enrolled in parchment for a perpetual memorial and testimony." Until the early nineteenth century the Supreme Court was a true court of record in this old common-law sense. All Supreme Court writs and judgment rolls were parchment — the dried, stretched and polished skin of a sheep. Parchment was expensive, and attorneys (or more likely their law clerks) wrote out writs and pleadings in tiny script to save space. The New York County Clerk's Office, the present repository for most of the colonial records of the Supreme Court, stores thousands of parchment rolls dating back to the seventeenth century. The State Archives has hundreds of judgment rolls that were filed in the Supreme Court's Albany office opened in the 1790's.

After 1798, however, judgment records were no longer true rolls, but sheets of paper trifolded and neatly tied with red cloth tape. This format continued until flat filing in standard file cabinets was introduced in the early twentieth century. Despite the changes in format, traditional elements in the record of a civil judgment persist. Still called a "judgment roll," the modem judgment record includes the pleadings, trial verdict and final judgment, which were likewise part of the ancient common-law judgment roll.

The common-law requirement that judgment rolls be retained as a "perpetual memorial and testimony" was embodied in a New York statute of 1807 and, as a result, no judgment roll of a court of record could legally be destroyed. Over the decades this law caused a mounting storage problem across the State until, in 1952, the Judiciary Law was amended to permit destruction of most categories of judgment rolls, by order of the Appellate Division. A 1990 amendment gives the Chief Administrator of the Courts the power to

But the common law casts a long shadow. The Judiciary Law still requires permanent retention of judgment rolls and other records affecting title to real property or the status, custody, marital rights or lineage of any individual. Most county clerks still retain judgment rolls, even after legal retention periods have passed, because past filing practices do not permit easy identification of categories of judgments that can be destroyed under current rules.

Appellate Division Documents

The most voluminous records of the Supreme Court, Appellate Division are records and briefs on appeal. Since 1984 Appellate Division records and briefs have been preserved on microfiche instead of paper. However, thousands of bound volumes of older records and briefs line the shelves of law libraries and the State Archives. The clerks of three of the four departments no longer maintain retrospective sets of records and briefs, having destroyed them or transferred them to other repositories.^[2] Complicating the situation, law libraries around the state hold sets of bound or microfilmed New York Supreme Court records and briefs.^[3] While many are duplicates of the sets compiled by the four clerks of the Appellate Division, some — especially the "cases and points" of the old Supreme Court General Term (1847-1895) — are unique.

In short, it appears that in no department is there a single, complete master set of Supreme Court records and briefs dating back to 1847. Law librarians and archivists face the enormous task of identifying and preserving (most effectively by microfilm) the most complete sets of records and briefs, filling in gaps where necessary, and disposing of unneeded duplicates.

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