New York's chief judge appointed "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon to the powerful commission that screens and recommends candidates for the state's highest court, drawing bipartisan criticism over her lack of any legal background.
Chief Judge Rowan Wilson tapped Nixon last Thursday for a seat on the 12-member Commission on Judicial Nomination, the body that vets every candidate for New York's Court of Appeals and sends a short list to the governor. The governor is constitutionally required to choose judges only from the commission's nominees, giving the panel outsized influence over who sits on the state's top bench.
Nixon, who played attorney Miranda Hobbes on HBO's hit series "Sex and the City," holds no law degree. Her unpaid appointment runs through April 30, 2030, the New York Post reported. State law requires that two of the chief judge's four appointees to the commission not be members of the New York State Bar, a provision that provides legal cover for the pick but does nothing to quiet the political backlash.
The reaction from Republicans was swift. Rep. Michael Lawler, R-N.Y., told Fox News Digital:
"Only in Kathy Hochul's New York could playing a lawyer on HBO qualify you to pick the judges on our state's highest court."
But the criticism was not limited to Republicans. Democratic Assemblymember Kalman Yeger of Brooklyn's Borough Park pinned the blame on members of his own party who blocked a prior judicial nominee, writing on X that Nixon's appointment is the price of that earlier fight.
"The price New Yorkers will pay for the bigots and haters who took out the immensely qualified Justice LaSalle is that Cynthia Nixon now gets to vet the judiciary. Excelsior!"
Nixon is not simply a celebrity dabbling in civic life. She is aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America and has a long record of progressive political activism in New York. In 2018, she challenged then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic gubernatorial primary and lost. She campaigned for Bill de Blasio's first mayoral run in 2013 and backed current Mayor Zohran Mamdani in 2025.
In November 2023, Nixon spoke outside the White House in Washington, D.C., announcing a hunger strike calling for a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and urging President Joe Biden to end U.S. military aid to Israel.
That record is what makes the appointment more than a curiosity item. Nixon is not a neutral civilian filling a lay seat on a commission. She is a committed political activist with deep ties to the progressive wing of New York Democratic politics, and she will now help decide which names the governor sees when the state's most consequential judicial vacancies open up.
State Sen. Anthony Palumbo of Suffolk County, the top Republican on the New York Senate Judiciary Committee, told Fox News Digital that Nixon's appointment should alarm every New Yorker:
"The appointment of a far-left, non-lawyer, Hollywood actress to the Commission on Judicial Nomination further reinforces the fact that the courts of New York have become entirely partisan."
Palumbo added:
"We should all be outraged by the abuse of this branch of government that is supposed to be immune from politics."
Saritha Komatireddy, a former prosecutor now running as a Republican to unseat state Attorney General Letitia James, framed the appointment as part of a pattern. She said that appointing a "celebrity activist with zero legal background to help shape the future of our judiciary sends the wrong message entirely."
Komatireddy went further in comments to the New York Post: "This is part of a broader trend in New York: politics increasingly taking precedence over public safety and common sense."
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley weighed in on X, writing that the move fits a pattern in which the "New York legal system continues to make a parody of itself." National Review's John Fund called it a sign of ideological capture, tweeting that "selecting far-left activist actress Cynthia Nixon to help select New York's top judges will not bring 'Justice In The City.'"
The backstory matters. Gov. Kathy Hochul originally nominated Justice Hector LaSalle to lead New York's highest court. Senate Democrats torpedoed the pick, objecting that LaSalle appeared too conservative and bowing to opposition from activist and labor groups. Hochul then settled on Rowan Wilson as chief judge.
Wilson now holds the power to appoint four members of the Commission on Judicial Nomination. Nixon is one of his selections. The commission's 12 seats are divided so that four members are not required to be licensed attorneys, a structural allowance that Wilson used to install an actress and political activist with no legal training whatsoever.
Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, a Republican from Niagara Falls, has been allotted one appointment to the commission following a recent retirement vacancy, Breitbart reported, citing the Albany Times-Union. That gives Republicans a single seat at the table while the commission's direction tilts further left.
Fox News Digital reached out to Nixon through the commission and to the Senate Republicans' office for comment. No response was reported. Chief Judge Wilson offered no public explanation for why he chose Nixon over any other non-lawyer candidate for the seat.
That silence leaves the most obvious question unanswered: What, specifically, qualifies Cynthia Nixon to evaluate candidates for New York's highest court? The commission is not a ceremonial body. It controls the pipeline of nominees the governor must choose from. Its members shape the ideological direction of the Court of Appeals for years.
Nixon brings no legal education, no judicial experience, and no record in the courtroom, but she does bring a long history of progressive political activism and close ties to the elected officials whose policy preferences often end up before the very court she will help staff.
New York's legal system did not need a celebrity appointment to raise questions about politicization. But Wilson handed critics the clearest example yet, and no one in Albany seems inclined to explain why.
