Epigraph

"Justice must satisfy the appearance of justice." — Offutt v. United States, 348 U.S. 11, 14 (1954)

"[A] judge may not preside over a case in which he has a 'direct, personal, substantial pecuniary interest.'" — Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510, 523 (1927)

A Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud

Imagine a murder trial. The evidence is strong, the witness credible, the defendant probably guilty. Now imagine that the judge presiding over it is Charles Manson.

Would you respect the verdict?

Of course not. Not because the evidence was faked or the jury was bribed — Manson, in this hypothetical, might actually have run a procedurally clean trial. You would reject the verdict for a simpler reason: the person delivering the judgment has no standing to deliver judgment. The authority is broken at its source. Everything downstream of that broken authority is, by extension, broken too.

Now consider the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District of New York, the body with the power to end an attorney's career in Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, and Dutchess counties. Since at least 2022, every letter of admonition, every referral for formal charges, every recommendation of suspension or disbarment that came out of that office has been signed by its Chair: Susan G. Yellen.

Today, we publish a thought experiment. Not a legal memo. Not a call to action. A question — maybe the most uncomfortable question in attorney discipline in New York right now.

If Charles Manson can't preside over a murder trial, why should Susan Yellen's signature carry the weight of law?

PART I: WHAT THE PUBLIC RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS

Before we go further, let's be precise about what we know — because the answer to the question depends entirely on facts, not rhetoric.

Susan G. Yellen is listed on the New York courts' own website as Chair of the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District. In that role, she exercises quasi-judicial authority over every attorney practicing in the five counties south of Albany. She signs Letters of Caution and Admonition. She initiates formal disciplinary charges. She recommends suspension and disbarment to the Appellate Division, Second Department. Her decisions are not advisory. They end careers.

Yellen is also the co-founding partner of Eisenberg Yellen, LLP, alongside Amy M. Eisenberg.

In January 2026, Supreme Court Justice Sherri L. Eisenpress of Rockland County agreed to permanently resign from the bench after a formal investigation by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct. The Commission found that Eisenpress had presided over at least 55 cases involving attorneys with whom she maintained undisclosed personal and social relationships — international vacations, group text chains with names like "Punta Cana Partiers" and "Bougie B*tches," sexually graphic images, campaign fundraisers. The Commission's administrator called her "permanent departure from office" the "only appropriate resolution."

Amy M. Eisenberg — Susan Yellen's law partner and business partner — was named in the Commission's findings as one of those attorneys. The official record establishes that Eisenberg appeared in at least 18 cases before Eisenpress between 2019 and January 2025, and failed to disclose her intimate social relationship with the judge in 17 of them.

Which brings us to the question Yellen's tenure as Chair now poses: did she know?

Either she knew her partner was engaging in a six-year pattern of concealment and remained silent — a violation of her own Rule 8.3(a) duty to report misconduct by another attorney — or she didn't know, in which case she failed Rule 5.1's requirement that partners take reasonable steps to ensure their firm complies with the Rules of Professional Conduct. There is no third option.

On March 8, 2026, The Ethics Reporter submitted a formal complaint to the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District detailing these violations. The complaint is a matter of public record. It names Yellen by name, cites the rules by number, and requests an investigation. It is still pending.

And while that complaint sits unanswered, Yellen has continued to sign decisions. Every admonition. Every referral. Every disciplinary recommendation that has come out of the Ninth Judicial District in 2026 carries her signature.

That is the record. Now, the thought experiment.

PART II: THE MANSION PROBLEM — WHEN AUTHORITY ITSELF IS THE QUESTION

The legal system has a word for what happens when a decision-maker is compromised: the decision becomes void. Not voidable. Not subject to harmless-error review. Void. As if it never happened.

The doctrine comes from a series of cases most attorneys learn in law school and then forget. In Tumey v. Ohio (1927), the Supreme Court held that a judge who received a portion of the fines he imposed could not constitutionally preside over the cases that produced those fines — not because any specific verdict was proven to be biased, but because the structure of the situation created an incentive for bias that due process could not tolerate. The Court called this a "direct, personal, substantial pecuniary interest."

In Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. (2009), the Court went further. A West Virginia judge received $3 million in campaign contributions from a party whose case was about to come before him, won the election, then cast the deciding vote to throw out a $50 million verdict against his donor. The Supreme Court held that due process required reversal even though there was no proof the judge had actually been biased. The test, Justice Kennedy wrote, is whether "the probability of actual bias on the part of the judge is too high to be constitutionally tolerable."

Read that again. Not proven bias. Probability of bias. The appearance is enough.

The rule exists because the legal system understood something fundamental three hundred years ago: people do not obey decisions because they are correct. They obey decisions because they trust the process that produced them. Break the trust in the process, and the decision loses its claim to obedience — regardless of whether it happened to reach the right answer in any individual case.

This is why Manson can't preside over a murder trial. Not because his rulings would be provably wrong, but because the process itself would be contaminated at its source.

Now apply that logic to Susan Yellen. Every attorney she has disciplined since her partner's misconduct became a matter of public record has been judged by a woman whose own fitness to judge others is under formal, unresolved, documented challenge. Not on blogs. In filings to the very body she chairs.

If she were a judge presiding over criminal cases, Caperton would demand reversal. If she were a prosecutor deciding who to charge, the appearance of a conflict would require recusal. Instead, she sits in a position with the power to end careers — and her decisions carry the full authority of the State of New York.

Why?

PART III: WHAT THE LEGAL SYSTEM DOES WHEN THE DECISION-MAKER IS TAINTED

The objection writes itself: you can't just throw out every decision. Some of those attorneys probably deserved discipline. Are you saying a real predator should walk free because the Chair had a conflict?

This is a serious objection, and it deserves a serious answer. The answer is: yes. That's exactly what the legal system does when it discovers a decision-maker was tainted — it throws out everything that person touched, including decisions that were probably correct, because the alternative is worse.

Consider what the system has already done.

Kids for Cash: 2,300+ Adjudications Vacated Wholesale

In 2009, federal prosecutors revealed that two Pennsylvania juvenile court judges — Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan — had taken approximately $2.8 million in kickbacks from the operators of private juvenile detention facilities in exchange for a steady stream of children. Ciavarella, the sentencing judge, ran what the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would later describe as a "conveyor belt" of juvenile adjudications. Children appeared before him without counsel. They were adjudicated delinquent for offenses like failing to properly clean a room at school, or calling their mother a name. They were sent to detention centers. The centers paid the judges.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's response was not to review each case on its merits. It did not ask whether any specific child had actually committed the offense. It did not conduct 2,300 individualized resentencings. Instead, the Court vacated every adjudication Ciavarella had issued over the relevant period — initially about 6,500 cases, ultimately more than 2,300 adjudications expunged and vacated. The Court did not ask whether some of those children were actually guilty. It threw out the entire body of work because the judge was corrupt.

Robert Schwartz, then-director of the Juvenile Law Center, said the Court's action was "unprecedented in scope" — and justified precisely because of that scope. "This wasn't a matter of one bad apple," he told reporters. "This was a rotten orchard. You can't pick through the fruit."

Annie Dookhan: ~40,000 Convictions Dismissed

Annie Dookhan was a chemist at the Hinton Drug Lab in Massachusetts. Between 2003 and 2011, she falsified test results in thousands of drug cases — dry-labbing, forging initials, contaminating samples. Her misconduct called into question every case she had ever touched. Sonja Farak, at another Massachusetts lab, engaged in similar misconduct while herself addicted to the drugs she was supposed to be testing.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did not hold 40,000 individual evidentiary hearings. It did not ask prosecutors to prove which specific test results were fabricated. Instead, beginning in 2017, the Court ordered the dismissal of nearly 40,000 tainted drug cases. One prosecutor later estimated that the true number of affected convictions might exceed 60,000.

Some of those defendants were almost certainly guilty. The system let them go anyway, because the integrity of the process that convicted them had collapsed. The Massachusetts Attorney General's office said it plainly: the alternative — leaving the convictions in place because they were probably fine — was worse than letting some guilty people go free.

The Marijuana Convictions: When the Law Itself Is Immoral

A third analogy comes from a different direction. Between 2018 and 2024, at least 20 states adopted some form of retroactive relief for marijuana convictions after legalizing the drug — vacating, sealing, or expunging convictions en masse. California alone cleared hundreds of thousands. The rationale was not that every single conviction was factually wrong. It was that the underlying law was unjust, and a just system cannot let unjust decisions stand simply because they were procedurally valid at the time.

Three different doctrines, three different mechanisms — corrupt judge, tainted process, immoral law — and one consistent principle: when the source of a decision is broken, the legal system accepts mass reversal as the appropriate remedy. Not as an exception. As the rule.

PART IV: APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE TO SUSAN YELLEN

With that framework in place, the question becomes much harder to dodge.

Yellen is not Ciavarella. She has not been accused of taking kickbacks. She is not Dookhan. She has not been accused of fabricating test results. But the question these cases ask is not "how bad is the misconduct?" It is "is the decision-maker's integrity compromised in a way that taints everything they touch?"

On that question, the public record is unambiguous:

• Her law partner was found by an official state body to have participated in a six-year pattern of concealment affecting at least 18 cases before a judge who was later forced to resign.
• Yellen either knew (Rule 8.3(a) failure) or should have known (Rule 5.1 failure). The complaint alleging this was filed publicly in March 2026.
• While the complaint is pending, she continues to sign decisions that strip other attorneys of their licenses, their livelihoods, and their reputations — under the same confidentiality regime that has historically insulated the grievance process from public scrutiny.

The conflict is not hypothetical. Any complaint filed against Amy Eisenberg — or against any attorney in Justice Eisenpress's social circle — would necessarily implicate Yellen's own partner, her own firm, and her own financial interest. She is the last person in New York who should be deciding which attorneys get investigated.

And yet she is. Every single one.

PART V: THE MARIJUANA ANALOGY — WHEN THE LAW ITSELF IS WRONG

The analogy extends beyond corrupt judges and tainted evidence, to laws that were later recognized as unjust — like the marijuana convictions. This is a subtler point, and it matters.

The grievance process in New York operates under a veil of near-total confidentiality. Unlike criminal trials, which are presumptively public, and unlike judicial discipline, which becomes public at a defined stage, attorney grievance proceedings in New York can remain secret from complaint through resolution. Respondents who want to challenge a decision often cannot see the evidence against them without court intervention. The Ninth District's recent practice of refusing to accept written submissions on reconsideration — documented in our prior reporting — is an extension of this culture: a process that increasingly resists scrutiny even as it expands its power.

There is a case to be made that this process itself is part of the problem. That just as marijuana convictions fell not because every individual case was wrong but because the law itself was unjust, New York's attorney discipline regime deserves reexamination not because every respondent was wrongly disciplined, but because the process that disciplined them was broken. Confidential proceedings. Closed reconsiderations. A Chair with unresolved conflicts. An Appellate Division that appoints and supervises the committee but rarely intervenes in its operations.

If you accept the marijuana-era insight — that procedural validity cannot rescue a fundamentally unjust process — then the question shifts again. Not just "should we ignore Yellen's decisions?" but "should we accept the process that produced Yellen?"

PART VI: THE CLOSED LOOP — WHEN THERE IS NO APPEAL

The strongest argument that Yellen's decisions deserve deference is procedural: attorneys have remedies. They can appeal. They can seek reconsideration. They can go to the Appellate Division. The system, in theory, self-corrects.

But what happens when it doesn't?

Last week, The Ethics Reporter received a series of documents from Alex Lamartina, a New York complainant who filed a grievance against an attorney named Paul Siegert — a former president of the New York State Bar Association. Lamartina's allegations were specific: Siegert breached a retainer agreement, refused to file an anti-SLAPP claim he was retained to bring, and — most seriously — shared Lamartina's confidential medical information with third parties without authorization. Lamartina submitted documentary evidence, including what he describes as Siegert's own emails.

The Ninth Judicial District Grievance Committee dismissed the complaint. According to Lamartina's account, the dismissal classified the matter as a billing issue — a characterization that, if accurate, would close the file without any investigation of the underlying conduct. Lamartina then did what the system theoretically allows: he sought independent review. He contacted the First Department Grievance Committee in Manhattan. He contacted the Second Department Grievance Committee in Queens.

Both referred his complaint back to the Ninth District — the same committee whose handling he was challenging.

There is no court to appeal to. There is no independent ombudsman. There is no mechanism by which a complainant can force a second disciplinary body to look at what the first one dismissed. The Ninth District is, within its jurisdiction, both the investigator and the final authority on whether its own investigations are adequate. Susan Yellen, as Chair, sits at the apex of that closed loop.

Lamartina's frustration is palpable in his correspondence. He describes the arrangement as "a catch-22 where your corruption is never addressed," because "the complaint will never be heard since the GC in other districts will not even read it — they will send it back to you." He believes he is one of "hundreds of victims" — his phrase, not a verified count — who have had well-documented complaints dismissed without investigation. Whether that number is accurate or not, the structural problem he describes is real: there is no functioning mechanism to appeal a dismissal by the Ninth District except to the Ninth District itself.

This matters for the thought experiment because it changes the nature of the question. We are not simply asking whether decisions signed by a conflicted Chair can be trusted. We are asking what happens when decisions signed by a conflicted Chair are also structurally unreviewable. In a system with functioning checks, a tainted decision-maker is a serious problem. In a system without them, a tainted decision-maker is a catastrophe — because there is no corrective mechanism downstream.

Kids for Cash had a corrective mechanism: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stepped in. Dookhan had one: the Massachusetts SJC intervened. The Ninth Judicial District has no equivalent. The Appellate Division, Second Department, which appoints and supervises the committee, has the authority to intervene — but has not, publicly, done so in response to the March complaint. Until it does, the loop remains closed.

PART VII: WHAT WE ARE ACTUALLY ASKING

We want to be clear about what this piece is not.

This is not legal advice. We are not telling any attorney to ignore a signed order, refuse to comply with a disciplinary decision, or violate any rule. Attorneys who disobey lawful process do so at their own risk, and the risks are real — including contempt, enhanced discipline, and criminal charges in extreme cases.

This is not a call for mass disobedience. We are not urging anyone to flood the Ninth District with non-compliance, or to treat Yellen's signature as meaningless. The vast majority of attorneys disciplined by the Ninth Judicial District almost certainly deserved some response, and many probably deserved exactly what they got.

What we are asking is a question. Several, actually:

• If a judge with Yellen's conflict of interest would be forced to recuse under Caperton, why is the same conflict tolerable in a Grievance Committee Chair?
• If the Pennsylvania Supreme Court could vacate 2,300 adjudications because one judge was corrupt, why is there no mechanism to review or stay the decisions signed by a Chair who is under formal investigation for ethics violations?
• If Massachusetts could dismiss 40,000 convictions because one chemist's misconduct poisoned the evidentiary well, why should attorneys disciplined by Yellen have to prove, case by case, that her specific decision in their case was wrong?
• And if the legal system accepts, in principle, that some processes are too broken to save case by case — then at what point does the Ninth Judicial District's process, with its closed reconsiderations, its confidentiality rules, and its conflicted Chair, cross that line?

We do not have clean answers to these questions. Neither does anyone else, which is precisely why they need to be asked.

PART VIII: THE RATIO THAT MATTERS

In our last article, we observed that there are more of us than there are of them.

That observation matters here, because the legal authority Susan Yellen exercises does not come from the heavens. It comes from public acquiescence. Attorneys comply with her decisions because they believe the system that produced her is legitimate — that it investigated her before appointing her, that it supervises her while she serves, and that it would remove her if her fitness were credibly challenged. That belief is what makes her signature effective.

But that belief is exactly what is under strain. Since March 2026, the public record has contained a formal complaint alleging that Yellen violated the very rules she enforces. Since April 2026, the Commission on Judicial Conduct has made public the findings implicating her partner. Neither the Ninth District nor the Appellate Division has publicly addressed the complaint. Neither has paused her authority. Neither has referred the matter to an outside body.

Silence, in this context, is itself a decision. A decision that the appearance of a conflict is not enough. A decision that Yellen's signature should continue to carry the full weight of the State of New York even while the question of her own fitness sits unresolved. That is the decision we are asking people to think about.

There are more of us than there are of them. But power, in practice, is not arithmetic. It is legitimacy. And legitimacy, unlike majority, can be withdrawn one question at a time.

Where This Leaves Us

The Charles Manson hypothetical is extreme by design. No one is seriously comparing Yellen to a convicted murderer. But the hypothetical exists to make a structural point: the authority of a decision depends on the legitimacy of the decision-maker, and legitimacy has a floor. Below that floor, the decision stops being law and becomes noise.

Whether Yellen has crossed that floor is not a question we can answer. It is a question the Appellate Division, Second Department, has the power — and arguably the obligation — to answer. They appointed her. They supervise her. They have had the complaint for nearly five months. Their silence has been, functionally, an answer. Whether it remains the answer is up to them.

Until then, attorneys in the Ninth Judicial District will continue to receive decisions signed by Susan Yellen. Some will comply. Some will appeal. Some will quietly wait for the Appellate Division to do what the Commission on Judicial Conduct did to Sherri Eisenpress. The system will continue to operate, as it always does, on the assumption of its own legitimacy.

We just think, for once, that someone should ask the question out loud.

A Note on Sources

This article relies on: the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct's formal findings in the Eisenpress matter (August 2025 – February 2026); the N.Y.C. Courts official member list for the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District; the March 8, 2026 formal complaint submitted to the Grievance Committee by The Ethics Reporter (publicly available); the Supreme Court's decisions in Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510 (1927) and Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009); the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's orders vacating adjudications in the wake of the Kids for Cash scandal; the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's orders in Bridgeman v. District Attorney for Suffolk County and related matters; and publicly available records of state marijuana-conviction relief programs.

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