Last week was an eventful one in the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in three appeals, all in closely watched cases. They are summarized here in reverse chronological order.

Jersey City United Against the New Ward Map v. Jersey City Ward Comm’n, ___ N.J. ___ (2025). [Disclosure: I represented the City of Jersey City and Councilman-at-Large Daniel Rivera as amici curiae in support of defendants, who prevailed in the Supreme Court]. In this appeal, the Court for the first time addressed the Municipal Ward Law, N.J.S.A. 40:44-9 et seq. (“MWL”). In particular, the appeal centered on the MWL’s requirement that ward maps, drawn every ten years following the decennial census, be “formed of compact and contiguous territory.”

Plaintiffs challenged the ward map adopted after the 2020 census as not being “compact.” They relied, among other things, on statistical measures that have been adopted in some jurisdictions and rejected in others, as to compactness. Those measures were not embodied in the MWL even though the creator of one of those measures was a participant in a commission report that underlay the MWL. Plaintiffs offered alternative maps where wards were more compact. Plaintiffs also criticized the adopted map for failing to keep together “communities of interest.”

The Court upheld the map by a 4-3 vote. Justice Patterson wrote the majority opinion, in which Chief Justice Rabner and Justices Pierre-Louis and Fasciale joined. Justice Wainer Apter authored the dissent, joined by Justices Noriega and Hoffman. This was the first 4-3 ruling of the current Term and only the second non-unanimous one.

Relying on analogous caselaw that stated that a redistricting plan “must be accorded a presumption of legality with judicial intervention warranted only if some positive showing of invidious discrimination or other constitutional deficiency is made,” the majority applied that presumption. Justice Patterson also relied on those cases for the principle that “is not our task to decide whether there is another map that would be fairer or better than the map at issue, but to determine whether the map selected is unlawful.”

The majority rightly observed that “the Legislature directed a ward commission to design wards that are compact, but did not prescribe a methodology for that determination or otherwise constrain a ward commission’s discretion.” On “visual inspection” of the map, it was sufficiently compact. The ward commission could consider the statistical measures on which plaintiffs relied but was not obligated to do so, as the MWL did not require that and the Court would not rewrite the statute.

For similar reasons, plaintiffs’ “communities of interest” argument did not avail. “There is no authority in the MWL, its legislative history, or our case law for plaintiffs’ argument that when it required wards to be ‘compact,’ the Legislature mandated that the members of a community of interest must vote in the same ward.” Ward commissions, Justice Patterson said, could “consider the impact of a ward’s boundaries on communities of interest, but if they do so, the preservation of those communities should be weighed as a separate factor, not as a component of compactness.”

Finally, the wards were not “bizarrely shaped,” which the analogous redistricting cases said would be problematic. Of the three wards that plaintiffs contested, the contours of two of them were largely determined “by Jersey City’s uneven borders with adjoining municipalities and natural features such as the Hudson and Hackensack Rivers.” The final disputed ward “was significantly altered when the Commission reduced [another ward’s] population by nearly thirty percent to meet the MWL’s population deviation requirement.” That requirement, the only other one besides compactness and contiguity, mandates that the population of the most populous ward on a map “shall not differ from the population of the least populous ward so created by more than [ten percent] of the mean population of the wards.” The dramatic increase in the population of the other ward justified the dimensions of the third disputed ward.

Plaintiffs also asserted an equal protection claim and a claim under the New Jersey Civil Rights Act. Given the Court’s ruling on the MWL issue, both of those other claims also failed.

Kratovil v. City of New Brunswick, ___ N.J. ___ (2025). This was a 5-0 ruling (Chief Justice Rabner and Justices Fasciale and Hoffman did not participate, and Judge Sabatino was temporarily assigned for this matter) in which the Court upheld Daniel’s Law, L. 2020, c. 125. Justice Patterson wrote the opinion.

“The Legislature enacted Daniel’s Law ‘to enhance the safety and security of certain public officials in the justice system,’ thereby enabling those officials to ‘carry out their official duties without fear of personal reprisal.’ N.J.S.A. 56:8-166.3. Subject to strict notice requirements, Daniel’s Law prescribes a procedure by which the home address and unpublished home telephone number of a public official designated as a ‘covered person’ can be protected from disclosure or redisclosure. N.J.S.A. 56:8-166.1; N.J.S.A. 2C:20-31.1. Daniel’s Law imposes civil liability on persons, businesses, and associations that violate the statute, N.J.S.A. 56:8-166.1(b) to (c), and provides for criminal liability for reckless or intentional violations, N.J.S.A. 2C:20-31.1-1(b), (d).”

A journalist filed an as-applied constitutional challenge to Daniel’s Law, asserting that it violated the guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The Law Division granted a motion to dismiss, which the Appellate Division affirmed. The Supreme Court also affirmed that result.

The subject of the journalist’s proposed publication was the specific address of New Brunswick’s Police Director, which an Open Public Records Act request was in Cape May. The Court applied the principles of Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co., 443 U.S. 97, 98, 102-03 (1979), and Florida Star v. B.J.F., 491 U.S. 524, 530 (1989), and determined that the specific address constituted truthful information, lawfully obtained, that addresses a matter of public concern that was, in fact, “a state interest of the highest order:” the protection of certain public officials and their immediate family members. The Court found that Daniel’s Law, as applied to prevent plaintiff’s proposed republication of the exact home address, was narrowly tailored to serve that state interest.

In the Matter Concerning the State Grand Jury, ___ N.J. ___ (2025). Chief Justice Rabner wrote this opinion for a unanimous Court. The issue was whether the State had the right to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by members of the clergy in the Catholic dioceses of New Jersey and present evidence to a state grand jury.” The Law Division held that that could not happen. The Appellate Division summarily affirmed, but the Supreme Court reversed those rulings as premature.

“The relevant case law and court rule on presentments [Rule 3:6-9] contemplate the existence of both a grand jury investigation and an actual presentment for an assignment judge to review. But here, no grand jury has completed an investigation, and no presentment exists.

Courts cannot presume the outcome of an investigation in advance or the contents of a presentment that has not yet been written. It was therefore premature for the trial court to conclude that any potential presentment in this matter had to be suppressed.

We find that the State has the right to proceed with its investigation and present evidence before a special grand jury. If the grand jury issues a presentment, the assignment judge should review the report and publish it if it complies” with the relevant legal standards that the Court went on to discuss.

While noting that “[w]hen an actual presentment is clearly and unquestionably contrary to the public good, assignment judges have the authority to strike it,” the Chief Justice stated that the Court would not decide the ultimate issue in this case now. Accordingly, the Court reversed the decision of the Appellate Division.