The case concerned the City of Hoboken Board of Commissioners' 1947 attempt to remove Otmar J. Pellet from his longtime role as assistant corporation attorney by repealing the 1943 ordinance establishing the law department and creating a new position of assistant city attorney filled by another appointee, after voters had adopted civil service protections in 1946. The Civil Service Commission set aside the removal and ordered Pellet restored, and the Supreme Court dismissed the city's writ of certiorari challenging that order. The court affirmed, holding that Pellet had acquired civil service tenure through his 1935 appointment without term and continued service, that the ordinance repeal lacked good-faith justification and was intended to evade civil service rules, and that the old and new positions were not sufficiently distinct to permit the change.
In Stein v. Schmitz, an attorney sued defendants including a client and his counsel for damages from alleged malicious injury to his professional standing as a New Jersey attorney, based on a complaint filed in the Supreme Court charging unprofessional and unethical conduct. The jury returned a verdict of no cause of action, and the plaintiff appealed only on two evidentiary rulings: admission of testimony from counsel about what the client had disclosed and exclusion of the Board of Bar Examiners report that had exonerated the plaintiff. The court affirmed the judgment, reasoning that counsel could testify about the client's statements to establish the defense of advice of counsel after full disclosure, and that the Board report was properly excluded because prior exonerating findings like grand jury actions are generally inadmissible in a civil suit to prove lack of probable cause. The court did not address the sufficiency of the complaint.
This case involved property owners in Watchung who sought a zoning variance to build a residence on a lot of 43,691 square feet, below the 60,000 square foot minimum required in the rural residential district by a 1941 ordinance. The Board of Adjustment denied the variance, but the court reversed that decision. The court reasoned that the lot qualified under the ordinance's exception for lots of record over 20,000 square feet at the time of adoption, and the failure to record the deed promptly was a mere clerical error causing undue hardship, as the lot could not otherwise be used for residential purposes or farming.
The case involved Charles Tedesco, a long-term municipal employee in Belleville, New Jersey, who sought a writ to compel the Civil Service Commission to certify his salary after the Commission refused due to a dispute over duties previously performed by another employee, Fred Handlon. Handlon had been suspended and removed from his position as clerk of the Recorder's Court but was later ordered reinstated by the Commission, which then directed that some of those duties be reassigned to him instead of Tedesco. The court held that the Commission lacked authority to withhold certification of Tedesco's payroll simply because it believed the town should recreate a position for Handlon. The reasoning was that no statute empowered the Commission to deprive a current civil service employee of salary for performing assigned duties on this basis, and any remedy for Handlon would need to rest on different grounds.
The case involved a widow's petition for workers' compensation benefits after her husband, a traveling salesman for the defendant corporation, was killed during a robbery by a hitchhiker while driving on company business between Chicago and Muskegon. The accident occurred out of state, leading to direct review by certiorari. The court reversed the Bureau's denial of compensation, holding that the death arose out of and in the course of employment. The core reasoning was that the incident resulted from risks incidental to highway travel required by the job, such as potential robbery, which was causally connected to his duties even though he had picked up the assailant.
This case involves a workers' compensation claim for the death of Joseph Cavallaro, a 64-year-old painter employed by Supreme Decorating Corp. The Bureau found that Cavallaro died of natural causes unrelated to his job, but the Court of Common Pleas reversed that determination. Upon making an independent review of the facts, the court concluded there was credible evidence that Cavallaro fell from a plank while painting due to dizziness from paint fumes in the room, establishing an accident arising out of and in the course of employment. The court rejected conflicting testimony from the employer's foreman as not credible and determined that the medical evidence was too speculative to overcome the claim. It therefore affirmed the judgment of the Court of Common Pleas and dismissed the writ with costs.
