THE MESSAGE TO SAY NOTHING 
Last year, Southern District Judge Deborah Batts refused to dismiss former Environmental Protection Agency Administer Christine Todd Whitman as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by residents, students, and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. The plaintiffs claimed Whitman made false statements about the air quality after the 9/11 attacks at ground zero, statements that they claimed “seduced them to go back to their homes and to send their kids back to school,” where they were exposed to hazardous dust and debris. It was, Batts said, “conscience-shocking.” Yesterday, as Forbes reports, the matter went before a three-judge panel at the Second Circuit, where attorneys for the Justice Department argued that the lawsuit would set a dangerous precedent: After national disasters, public officials would worry that their words of reassurance would open them up to personal liability. “If you speak, you will be potentially held liable," an attorney said. "Then the clear message for government officials is to say nothing.” Meanwhile, the EPA's Office of the Inspector General had previously determined that the White House pressured the agency to make misleading statements that internal data didn’t legitimate.  -J.S.

CRYING WOLF?
In other news, Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye has revved up a previous threat to file a lawsuit demanding pay raises for New York’s judiciary. According to an AP thread in Newsday, she says a suit could go forward next month if lawmakers end their December session without a vote to raise pay. “I so don't want to do that,” said Kaye. "I've been a lawyer for 45 years, and I know the pluses and minuses of litigation. To me it is a last resort, but I've come just about to the end of my patience.” She added, “If they don't do it now, they'll come back in an election year, and nobody wants to talk about raises in an election year.”  -J.S.

FIRETOG'S FINAL FLING
Saying that it is “time for a change” and that he wants to go “back to trying cases,” Brooklyn Supreme Court's Acting Criminal Term Administrative Judge Neil Firetog is leaving his post and returning to the courtroom, The New York Law Journal reports. It is unclear whether the decision was his or the OCA’s: the Law Journal quotes independent sources as saying Chief Administrative Judge Ann Pfau notified Firetog last Friday that she was replacing him. OCA spokesperson David Bookstaver wouldn’t comment on the rumors. (“They are just people trying to come up with a story,” Firetog said, and “there is no story there.”) “This is more of a disappointment than our not getting a pay raise,” said one Brooklyn judge of the departure of the popular Firetog. Meanwhile, the Law Journal speculates that Firetog’s appointment of Court of Claims Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder as a special prosecutor to investigate whether or not to bring perjury charges against a witness in the R. Lindley Devecchio trial may have irked Pfau.  -J.S.
 
POWER COMPANY PETITIONS 
Newsday reports that New York Regional Interconnect Inc. (NYRI), the firm that wants to build a $1.6 billion high-voltage transmission line to deliver electricity from Utica to the lower Hudson Valley (an area where power demand is expected to outstrip supply soon), has filed a petition asking the New York Public Service Commission to clarify whether the agency still has the authority to approve the project and whether such approval would allow NYRI to claim property for the line by eminent domain. A state law passed in 2006 restricts NYRI’s use of eminent domain, but the company’s attorney says he is “pretty comfortable that the law either doesn't apply to NYRI or is unconstitutional,” and would pursue another lawsuit — a federal judge refused to invalidate the law last year —or seek approval through a new federal power line mandate.  -J.S.

THE LONG, SLOW ARM OF THE LAW
Finally, Eastern District Judge I. Leo Glasser signed an order last week fining Nassau County’s Village of Island Park $5.4 million, finally drawing a 17-year-old federal civil rights case against the town to a close, the New York Times reports. The suit, brought in 1990, alleged that the village had rigged an early-1980 loan lottery, awarding federally subsidized loans to politically connected village residents — many of them friends and family of former Senator Alfonse D’Amato, an Island Village native (who was never officially accused of wrongdoing in connection with this case) — instead of the low-income families for whom they were intended. Many of the homes’ original owners have long since left the village, leaving today’s residents — some of whom wouldn’t even have been old enough to own property when the suit commenced — to foot the bill. This isn’t the first time the Times has taken notice of Judge Glasser’s ponderous ways: Way back in 1995, it published a multi-page article pillorying the jurist for taking his time in resolving a number of cases — among them, the same Island Park case today’s article covered. Back then, the Times said that his courtroom was known to lawyers as the “black hole.” (Given their failure to mention this previous coverage, one wonders if it’s the same black hole that their 1995 piece fell into when they were fact-checking today’s report.) In the words of one federal prosecutor who thought too much time had passed already when the Times spoke with him in 1995, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Indeed.  -L.N.