SCHOOL FUNDS: WHO'S IN CHARGE?
It has been more than a decade since litigation over funding to New York City public schools began. Today the state’s highest court hears the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s complaint that the state shortchanged the city by billions of dollars. Lower court (beginning with Manhattan Supreme Court judge Leland DeGrasse) have ruled in the CFE’s favor and ordered that the state pay $4.7 billion more a year for the city’s public schools — but the state is seeking to reduce that judgment to $1.93 billion. Chief Judge Judith Kaye ruled three years ago that the judiciary had “neither the authority, nor the ability, nor the will, to micromanage education funding,” but the case returns to her today anyway. Previews appear in The New York Times and other papers today, but the New York Law Journal is worth quoting with this summary: “This is the third go-around for Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State, and in this inning the pivotal issue seems to be the separation of powers doctrine. . . . The courts, the state Legislature, the governor, the educational system and advocates of various stripes continue to war over just what the constitutional mandate to provide a ‘sound basic education’ means in dollars and cents.”

TIME SERVED — PLUS
Oral arguments are scheduled for tomorrow in Albany in a case that turns on whether state officials can confine convicted sex offenders to psychiatric facilities even after their prison sentences end. The Court of Appeals will hear the case involving a dozen men who are convicted sex offenders and being held in mental institutions, AM New York reports. In 2005, Gov. George Pataki ordered state authorities to begin evaluating every sexually violent convict before their release from prison to determine whether confinement in a mental institution was warranted. That was done under the auspices of existing mental health law. Now more than 100 convicts are committed to mental institutions.

 
BURIAL RIGHTS
The Bloomberg administration is asking U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein to throw out a suit filed by 9/11 victims’ families that requests a “proper burial” for those who died in WTC. The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan last year and if successful, would require the city to excavate tons of material at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island where debris from the WTC site was shipped, the New York Sun and the Daily News report. The city argued that the court is not empowered to “order the City of New York to commit tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollar to resift and relocate the materials.