Longtime Brooklyn judge hanging up the robe after 35 years on bench

From left: Lawrence Knipel, Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, Frank Seddio and Mark Partnow. Photo by: Ramy Mahmoud.

In celebration of Lawrence Knipel’s retirement from the Brooklyn judiciary, friends, family and colleagues feted the state Supreme Court justice at an event last week in Williamsburg—and the judge treated his well wishers to a song.

Knipel has spent more than 35 years on the bench, 12 of which serving as Brooklyn Supreme Court’s administrative judge for civil matters. And at the end of the week, he’s hanging up his robe for good.

At his retirement party, held on Oct. 22 at Giando on the Water, Knipel showed off his other area of expertise. He picked up a guitar and jammed with Justice Matthew D’Emic, the administrative judge for criminal matters for Brooklyn Supreme Court, and the two jurists led the crowd in a sing-along of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

Cooperation was a theme in remarks Knipel delivered prior to the performance, wherein he praised courthouse staff.

“You’re running a big organization, a big bureaucracy. Everyone’s got to work together. Everyone’s got to know their assigned task and try to have a little bit of understanding of what the next one’s task is,” Knipel said. “And you get there were so many histories of so many other bureaucracies, other counties, where there’s infighting and in defining and backstabbing among staff. We never had that in Brooklyn, never my experience. Everybody relied on everybody else. It was, it was really, you know, a labor of love, I have to say—12 years, it was easy.”

Knipel has said that, while he’s no longer clocking in at the civil courthouse at 360 Adams St. in Downtown Brooklyn, he’s planning to go into private practice.