Page 5 - WCBA Appellate Practice Committee CLE May 2024-Handout

BIOGRAPHY

Hon. Mark C. Dillon

Mark C. Dillon has been a Justice of the Appellate Division, Second Judicial Department, since

the summer of 2005 and is currently the senior associate justice of the court. He was elected to the

Supreme Court in the Ninth Judicial District in 1999 and re-elected in 2013. Prior, Justice Dillon served

as a Judge of the Westchester County Court in 1997 and as a Town Justice of the Town of Yorktown

from 1988 to 1997. His career also includes three years as a Westchester County Assistant District

Attorney, and a total of twelve years as a trial attorney at the White Plains law firms of Cerussi & Spring

P.C. and Dillon & Sarcone, LLP.

Justice Dillon earned a B.A. from Colgate University, an M.A. from NYU, and a J.D. from

Fordham Law School. He is an author of the McKinney’s CPLR Practice Commentaries beginning with

the 2019 supplements and in the years that have followed, including four new hard cover volumes that

have replaced those earlier authored by Professor David Siegel of Albany Law School. He has published

seven law review articles during the past decade through the Albany, Pace, NYU, Cardozo, and Hofstra

Law Schools. Justice Dillon also published a 449-page hard cover book of legal history entitled Montana

Vigilantes 1863-1870: Gold, Guns & Gallows (Univ. of Colorado Press, 2013), one of five books

nominated nationally for “History Book of the Year” by the Mountains and Plains Independent

Booksellers’ Association. More recently, he authored a book of legal history entitled The First Chief

Justice: John Jay and the Struggle of a New Nation (SUNY Press, 2022), which focuses on Jay’s career

and cases while the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Jay book was one of ten books

nominated nationally for History Book of the Year by the Foreword Independent Bookseller Association.

Dillon has been since 2009 an adjunct professor of New York Practice at Fordham Law School,

and through the school, has volunteered time during certain summers teaching mediation techniques to

tribal chiefs, priests, and imams in remote regions of western Africa.

2