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 2001 / Served to 2004

Sandra L. Townes

Justice, New York Appellate Division

Sandra L. Townes was a Justice of the New York Appellate Division, who joined the court in 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2001–2004 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	New York Appellate Division	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Townes authored 3 published opinions for the court (2002–2003). Most cited: Cupo v. Karfunkel (303 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. 3 of these were attributed to Townes 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
2003	Cupo v. Karfunkel†	1 A.D.3d 48	303
2003	Godoy v. Abamaster of Miami, Inc.†	302 A.D.2d 57	49
2002	Sheffield Towers Rehabilitation & Health Care Center v. Novello†	293 A.D.2d 182	7

Showing the 3 most-cited of 3 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 Sandra L. Townes on?: Sandra L. Townes was a Justice of the New York Appellate Division.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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3 years 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).