The imminently quotable New York City Mayor Ed Koch once said in the 1970s—at a time when the Big Apple was in the throes of fiscal crisis—that the city’s Law Department was one of “two agencies on the front lines protecting the city.” (The other was the Office of Management and Budget.)
Georgia Pestana, the third and final corporation counsel to serve under Mayor Bill de Blasio, recently invoked Koch’s words in a column for the Law Journal reflecting on a short tenure defined by a much different threat to the city—the COVID-19 pandemic.
