History
The Legislature originated in the revolutionary New York Provincial Congress, assembled by Rebels when the Provincial Legislature would not send delegates to the Continental Congress.
The legislature's history of corruption includes the so-called Black Horse Cavalry.
In the 1840s, New York launched the first great wave of civil procedure reform in the United States by enacting the Field Code. The Code inspired similar reforms in 23 other states, and gave birth to the term "code pleading" for the system of civil procedure it created. However, many later attempts at further civil procedure reform and modernization were unsuccessful. Today, New York is widely considered to have one of the most archaic and inefficient systems of civil procedure in the United States.
The first African-American elected to the legislature was Edward A. Johnson, a Republican, in 1917. The first women elected to the legislature were Republican Ida Sammis and Democrat Mary Lilly, both in 1919. The first African-American woman elected to legislature was Bessie A. Buchanan in 1955.
Five assemblymen were expelled in 1920 for belonging to the Socialist Party.
In a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the constitutionality of a law enacted by the New York Legislature, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his concurring opinion: "s I recall my esteemed former colleague, Thurgood Marshall, remarking on numerous occasions: 'The Constitution does not prohibit legislatures from enacting stupid laws.'"
Read more about this topic: New York State Legislature
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)