How do judges of the New York Appellate Division reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

New York Appellate Division / Joined 1997 / Served to 1998

Nicholas Colabella

Justice, New York Appellate Division

Nicholas Colabella was a Justice of the New York Appellate Division, who joined the court in 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1936 · age 90
Tenure: 1997–1998 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	New York Appellate Division	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Colabella authored 1 published opinion for the court (1997). Most cited: People v. Cantres (4 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 1 of these was attributed to Colabella by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1997	People v. Cantres†	238 A.D.2d 56	4

Showing the 1 most-cited of 1 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the New York Appellate Division reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Nicholas Colabella on?: Nicholas Colabella was a Justice of the New York Appellate Division.

Sources

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1 year on the New York Appellate Division. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).