America's Divorce Lawyer Funded Three Rockland Judges
Under the court system's own rule, James J. Sexton's contributions disqualified three Rockland judges from hearing his cases.
The New York court system publishes a list of the people whose campaign contributions are large enough to bar a judge from being assigned their cases. A nationally known divorce lawyer has given the Rockland County bench many times that amount. Each time his name went on the list, and each time the court system took it off, on the theory that after two years a judge no longer remembers who paid him over $15,000 for the campaign.
James J. Sexton practices divorce and family law from two offices, one at 31 Hudson Yards in Manhattan and one at 301 North Main Street in New City, the county seat of Rockland County, roughly thirty miles north of New York City. He was admitted to the New York bar in 2001 and opened the Law Offices of James J. Sexton, P.C. that year.1 By his firm’s account he has tried matrimonial and custody matters in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Rockland, Westchester and Orange Counties for almost twenty-five years.2
He has described a high-volume local practice in the Rockland and Orange County family courts.3
He is also, unusually for a suburban practitioner, nationally known. He has written two books on marriage and divorce, the first a bestseller in 2018, and he has appeared on the podcasts of Lex Fridman, Steven Bartlett and Lewis Howes, before audiences in the tens of millions.4 A November 2024 announcement of his appointment as an adviser to a prenuptial agreement company called him America’s Divorce Lawyer and credited him with more than a billion views on TikTok.5
His master’s degree, taken at New York University before he studied law at Fordham, was in persuasive speech and propaganda, according to his firm’s biography.6
What follows is drawn from two public databases, one kept by the New York State Board of Elections and one by the Office of Court Administration, and from contemporaneous reporting.
The rule that takes the case away
Most judges in New York are elected. They run campaigns, and the campaigns are funded in part by the lawyers who will later appear before them. On July 15, 2011, the Chief Administrator of the Courts adopted Part 151 of the Rules of the Chief Administrator, Rules Governing the Assignment of Cases Involving Contributors to Judicial Campaigns.7
The rule fixes a number: if an attorney appearing as counsel of record, or that attorney's firm, or a party, has given twenty-five hundred dollars or more to the judge's campaign, a campaign contribution conflict exists, and no case may be assigned to that judge. The exceptions are narrow: an emergency, the rule of necessity, or where the interests of justice requires.8 If the attorneys, their firms and their clients together reach thirty-five hundred dollars, the same follows, and repeat gifts from one person during a campaign window are added together and counted as one.9
The bar lasts two years from the day the Board of Elections publishes the contribution. If the recipient was not yet a judge when it was published, the two years start the day he takes office.10
Two things about the rule matter for what follows. It governs assignment, not recusal, and the court system says so itself: the Part restricts what the clerks may assign, it changes no judge’s ethical obligations, and a case assigned by mistake despite a conflict stays assigned and gives no party any claim.11
And the rule does not say the problem ends when the two years do. It says the opposite, twice, in its own text, providing that expiration and administrative error alike leave the judge’s duty to consider recusal untouched, and that a judge is to remain mindful of recusal wherever his impartiality might reasonably be questioned because of contributions.12
Twenty-five hundred dollars is not where a contribution starts to matter. It is where the court system stops asking the judge about it and takes the case away through the clerk’s office.
The list the court system publishes
The same Part tells the Chief Administrator to publish a list of contributions and contributors to judicial candidates in a form that helps identify these conflicts, and to have court clerks and administrative judges resolve them locally; with as little involvement from the assigned judge as possible.13 The list is one statewide document, ordered by judicial district and then county. Each row gives a judge, a contributor, a date, and an amount in one of two columns, one for eight hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars and one for twenty-five hundred and above.14
The date column is headed Date off list.
In the current version, which reports the list as it stood on October 15, 2025, all of Rockland County is six rows across three judges. Two are Christopher Joseph Exias, a Rockland County Family Court judge: Construction to Perfection LLC at $3,846, off the list November 19, 2025, and the matrimonial firm Miller Zeiderman LLP at $2,500, off January 7, 2026. Three are Larry J. Schwartz, a Supreme Court Justice, all in the lower column. The sixth is a village justice.15 Those six rows are everything the court system discloses about disqualifying contributions to the Rockland County bench.
The money
The Board of Elections keeps a database of contributions searchable by contributor as well as by recipient.16 Searched for Sexton, it returns filings from 2003 to April of this year.
Leaving out his gifts to legislators, district attorneys and county officers, and counting only committees whose names identify them as judicial campaigns, he gave more than thirty-three thousand dollars in his own name to eighteen judicial campaign committees over twenty-three years, and his professional corporation gave to several of the same committees.17 Most are in the hundreds of dollars, of the kind found throughout the filings of every practicing bar in the state.
Four contributions to judicial campaigns are in the thousands.
On September 9, 2015, he gave $7,600 to McGuane for Family Court, filer 17231. The candidate was Rachel Tanguay-McGuane, who won the Rockland County Family Court election that November and now sits as a Justice of the Supreme Court as Rachel E. Tanguay.18
His corporation gave the same committee $3,016 the day before and $1,100 the previous May.19 The $7,600 is three times the disqualifying amount by itself, the rule counts the corporation’s money with his, and the two September payments were a day apart.
On July 24, 2018, he gave $2,500 to Zugibe4justice, filer 3836. That is the threshold exactly.20 Thomas P. Zugibe was then District Attorney of Rockland County and a candidate for the Supreme Court in the Ninth Judicial District. He won on November 6, 2018, resigned as District Attorney at the end of the year, and took the bench on January 1, 2019.21
On June 2, 2023, he gave $15,139 to Friends of Chris Exias, filer 308786.22 The Board of Elections codes it as a monetary contribution from an individual, so it is neither an in-kind gift nor several smaller ones added up, and the $15,139 sits against a disqualifying amount of $2,500.
On April 15, 2026, he gave $1,000 to Alden Wolfe for Supreme Court, filer 591402.23 Alden H. Wolfe is a New City attorney and Rockland County legislator, designated six weeks earlier by the county Democratic chairman as the party’s choice for the Supreme Court seat Sherri L. Eisenpress was vacating on April 28, after she agreed with the Commission on Judicial Conduct to resign and never again seek judicial office in New York.24 The gift came thirteen days before the seat opened. Wolfe is still a candidate, and the seat is filled at the November election.25
The filings also record gifts to a second judge now sitting on the Rockland County Family Court alongside Exias, to the Rockland Supreme Court justice already on the current Part 151 list, and to a Westchester Family Court judge on it as well.26 His corporation gave to several of those committees too, and the rule adds that money to his own against the collective threshold.
The race for the Family Court seat
Exias won the seat in 2023 in a contested Democratic primary and ran unopposed in November, so the June primary decided it. Sexton gave his $15,139 on June 2.
A news report that November set out the money in the race from Board of Elections records. A cryptocurrency entrepreneur gave $2,500 and his chief of staff the same. A New Jersey man was recorded as giving $4,500 and told the reporter by telephone that he had never heard of the candidate and did not know how a contribution came to be in his name, though the address in the filing was his. The Rockland County District Attorney’s committee gave $400, and the former Supreme Court justice Exias had clerked for gave $100.27 The report does not list Sexton’s gift, which was larger than all five together.
The same report also quotes Sexton. Asked about the race, he said he expected Exias to follow the governing Second Department precedents, because the appellate division and the Court of Appeals would be watching.28 The report identifies him as a divorce lawyer and does not mention his contribution.
What the list no longer shows
Sexton is not in the October 2025 list. Neither is Tanguay, nor the Exias contribution. The reason is the column headed Date off list. The list holds only the conflicts that are running when it is generated, so when two years pass the row comes out, and the version that replaces it shows nothing where the row was.
The dates can be worked out from the rule and the filings, and three periods come out of them. The 2015 gifts to the committee that became Justice Tanguay’s ran from her induction in January 2016 to January 2018, because she was not a judge when they were reported. The July 2018 gift to Justice Zugibe ran from his induction on January 1, 2019 to January 1, 2021, for the same reason. The June 2023 gift to Judge Exias ran instead from publication, because he was already a judge, having been elected Village Justice of Spring Valley in November 2021 and serving through 2023.29
The clock therefore did not wait for his induction to the Family Court on January 18, 2024.30 Filed under the 2023 eleven-day pre-primary report, published shortly before a late-June primary, it ran from the middle of June 2023 to the middle of June 2025, four months before the October list was taken.
The three conflict periods span nine years, and none of them appears in the list as published now, on the theory that after two years a judge no longer remembers who paid him over $15,000 for the campaign.
A litigant who wanted to establish any of this today would find that the Board of Elections still has the contributions, because campaign filings are permanent, and that the Office of Court Administration still has the rule, because rules are published, and that the one document which put the two together and stated the consequence has been overwritten. No earlier version is kept.
What the record does not show
Whether the $15,139 exceeded the contribution limit for a Rockland County Family Court campaign in 2023 turns on a formula. For offices other than statewide and legislative ones, the State Board of Elections sets the primary limit at the number of enrolled voters in the candidate’s party in the district, excluding voters in inactive status, multiplied by five cents, with a floor of one thousand dollars and a ceiling of fifty thousand, and sets the general election limit by applying the same multiplier to all registered voters in the district.
The Board cites Election Law section 14-114 and directs anyone asking about a county race to the county board of elections, which supplies the local enrollment figures.31 No conclusion is drawn here.
Nothing in the public record shows that any of these contributions was unlawfully made or accepted, or that any judge decided anything differently because of one. New York attorney registration records show Sexton currently registered, with no public disciplinary finding.
End Notes
1. Law Offices of James J. Sexton, P.C., “Manhattan.” https://www.nycdivorces.com/manhattan Rockland County office address per the firm’s directory listing, 301 North Main Street, Suite 1, New City. https://lawyers.law.cornell.edu/lawyer/james-joseph-sexton-1276291
2. Law Offices of James J. Sexton, P.C., “The Firm.” https://www.nycdivorces.com/the-firm/
3. Lauren Hakimi, “Why Haredi leaders ran a massive campaign for a family court judge in Rockland County,” Shtetl, November 5, 2023. https://www.shtetl.org/article/why-haredi-leaders-ran-a-massive-campaign-for-a-family-court-judge
4. James Sexton (attorney), Wikipedia, and Law Offices of James J. Sexton, P.C., “Biography.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Sexton_(attorney)
5. Newsfile Corp., “James Sexton, Top Divorce Attorney in NYC, Joins HelloPrenup,” November 18, 2024. https://markets.financialcontent.com/pennwell.elp/article/newsfile-2024-11-18-james-sexton-top-divorce-attorney-in-nyc-joins-helloprenup
6. Law Offices of James J. Sexton, P.C., “Biography.” https://www.nycdivorces.com/our-attorneys/
7. 22 NYCRR Part 151, Rules Governing the Assignment of Cases Involving Contributors to Judicial Campaigns, section 151.1(E). https://www.nycourts.gov/rules/part-151-rules-governing-assignment-cases-involving-contributors-judicial-campaigns
8. 22 NYCRR 151.1(A)(1) and 151.1(B)(1). https://www.nycourts.gov/rules/part-151-rules-governing-assignment-cases-involving-contributors-judicial-campaigns
9. 22 NYCRR 151.1(B)(2) and 151.1(B)(3)(b). https://www.nycourts.gov/rules/part-151-rules-governing-assignment-cases-involving-contributors-judicial-campaigns
10. 22 NYCRR 151.1(B)(3)(a). https://www.nycourts.gov/rules/part-151-rules-governing-assignment-cases-involving-contributors-judicial-campaigns
11. New York State Unified Court System, “Important Information Related To Part 151.” https://ww2.nycourts.gov/rules/chiefadmin/151-intro.shtml See also 22 NYCRR 151.1(A)(2).
12. 22 NYCRR 151.1(A)(2)(d) and 151.1(D). https://www.nycourts.gov/rules/part-151-rules-governing-assignment-cases-involving-contributors-judicial-campaigns
13. 22 NYCRR 151.1(C)(1) and 151.1(C)(3). https://www.nycourts.gov/rules/part-151-rules-governing-assignment-cases-involving-contributors-judicial-campaigns
14. New York State Unified Court System, Rule 151 List, current as of October 16, 2025. https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFS/RULES/chiefadmin/Part151completereport.pdf
15. Rule 151 List as of October 15, 2025, District 9, Rockland, page 49. https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFS/RULES/chiefadmin/Part151completereport.pdf
16. New York State Board of Elections, Public Reporting System, Campaign Disclosure, Contributions by Contributor.
https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov
17. Author’s tabulation of the complete contributor query results for James J. Sexton and the Law Offices of James J. Sexton, P.C., New York State Board of Elections Public Reporting System, retrieved August 2026. Contributions to non-judicial committees and contributions attributable to other individuals sharing the surname are excluded.
https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov
18. New York State Board of Elections, McGuane For Family Court, filer identification number 17231, 2015 State/Local 10-Day Post-Primary report.
https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov
19. New York State Board of Elections, McGuane For Family Court, filer identification number 17231, 2015 State/Local 10-Day Post-Primary and 2015 State/Local July Periodic reports, Schedule B, monetary contributions received from a corporation.
https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov
20. New York State Board of Elections, Zugibe4justice, filer identification number 3836, 2018 State/Local 32-Day Pre-General report.
https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov
21. Trellis.Law, Judge Thomas P. Zugibe, professional background. https://trellis.law/judge/thomas.p.zugibe See also Daily Voice, “Rockland DA Zugibe Will Run For State Supreme Court,” January 26, 2018. https://dailyvoice.com/ny/new-city/news/rockland-da-zugibe-will-run-for-state-supreme-court/731868/
22. New York State Board of Elections, Friends of Chris Exias, filer identification number 308786, 2023 State/Local 11-Day Pre-Primary report, Schedule A, monetary contributions received from individuals and partnerships.
https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov
23. New York State Board of Elections, Alden Wolfe for Supreme Court, filer identification number 591402, 2026 State/Local July Periodic report.
https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov
24. Rockland County Business Journal, “Rockland County Legislator Alden Wolfe Tapped By Dems To Replace Sherri Eisenpress on Rockland Supreme Bench,” March 3, 2026. https://rcbizjournal.com/2026/03/03/rockland-county-legislator-alden-wolfe-tapped-by-dems-to-replace-sherri-eisenpress-on-rockland-supreme-bench/ On the resignation stipulation, see Daily Voice, February 3, 2026. https://dailyvoice.com/ny/new-city/rockland-supreme-court-justice-to-step-down-barred-from-future-judgeships-after-ethics-probe/
25. Alden Wolfe for Supreme Court, campaign website.
https://www.aldenwolfeforsupremecourt.com/
26. Rockland County Family Court, judges of the court, New York State Unified Court System. https://www.nycourts.gov/courts/9th-judicial-district/rockland-county-family-court For the Part 151 entries, see note 14.
27. Shtetl, November 5, 2023, reporting contributions to the Exias campaign from New York State Board of Elections records. https://www.shtetl.org/article/why-haredi-leaders-ran-a-massive-campaign-for-a-family-court-judge
28. Shtetl, November 5, 2023. The precedents referred to are the Second Department decisions in the Weichman and Weisberger matters, described in the same article. https://www.shtetl.org/article/why-haredi-leaders-ran-a-massive-campaign-for-a-family-court-judge
29. Patch, “Village Justice Exias Seeking Seat On Rockland County Family Court,” February 2023. https://patch.com/new-york/newcity/village-justice-exias-seeking-seat-rockland-county-family-court
30. Monsey Scoop, “Three Judges and Commissioner of Jurors Sworn in at Rockland County Courthouse,” January 2024. https://monseyscoop.com/three-judges-and-commissioner-of-jurors-sworn-in-at-rockland-county-courthouse/
31. New York State Board of Elections, Contribution Limits, Candidate Contribution Receipt Limits, table for All Other Public Offices and Supreme Court Justice. https://elections.ny.gov/contribution-limits See Election Law section 14-114 and 9 NYCRR 6214.0.