Province of New Jersey

New Jersey is a constituent Province of the United Kingdom of America lying between the Hudson and the Delaware, bounded by New York to the north and across the Hudson to the east, Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties on the Delaware across the river to the west, and the Atlantic to the east and south. Trenton is the capital and Newark the largest city. The population is approximately 9.4 million, and New Jersey returns twelve members to the federal House of Commons.

It is the densest polity in the Realm and it has no city of its own.

That sentence is the whole of the article. New Jersey holds more people per square kilometre than anywhere else in the United Kingdom of America, has among the highest household incomes, produces more per resident than all but two polities, and contains not one metropolis. Newark, its largest place, has about three hundred thousand people, which would make it a middling town in most polities of comparable weight. Trenton, the capital, has under ninety thousand and is unknown outside the Province.

The reason is that New Jersey lies between two cities that are not its. New York is across the Hudson and Philadelphia is across the Delaware, and the Province is divided between them along a line running roughly from Trenton to the sea: north and east of it a household reads a New York paper, watches New York news and supports New York teams; south and west of it, Philadelphia’s. There is no point in the Province from which both can be ignored, and there is no New Jersey city large enough to make the question irrelevant.

The Province has therefore spent four hundred years being the ground between. It was two proprietary colonies before it was one. It was the corridor the armies crossed in the Four-Year War. It became the workshop, then the laboratory, then the dormitory, and latterly the warehouse, of two metropolitan economies whose capital, credit and reputation belong elsewhere. New Jersey makes the medicines, stores the goods, houses the workers and keeps the contamination, and the consumption happens across two rivers.

It is not a poor arrangement and the Province does not pretend it is. It is, on almost every measure the Realm publishes, among the most fortunate places in it. What it has never had is a centre of its own, and the consequences of that absence run through everything below: five hundred and sixty-four municipalities that will not combine, a property tax that is the highest in the Realm, four cities that are poor in the richest Province of the Union, and a provincial court that spent sixty years trying to make the towns behave as though they were one polity.

History

The Lenape

The country was Lenape, the people the English called Delaware, organised in autonomous bands along the rivers and the shore, growing maize and beans on the bottomlands, fishing the bays, and moving seasonally between the coast and the interior along paths that a great many of the Province’s modern roads still follow.

The Lenape were not conquered. They were bought out and pressed out, over about a century, by a succession of purchases whose terms they and the purchasers understood differently, and by an epidemic mortality that preceded most of the settlement. The Treaty of Easton of 1758 extinguished the remaining claims in New Jersey, and the Province established at Brotherton in the pine country the only Indigenous reservation in its history, which lasted about sixty years before its residents sold it and left for New York.

Lenape communities remain in the southern counties, and their recognition, which the Province granted in 1982 and the Realm has never completed, is a live question discussed below.

Two provinces

New Jersey was granted in 1664 to two proprietors, and in 1676 it was divided.

East Jersey, in the north, was settled from New England and from Long Island, with a Dutch and Scots overlay, its capital at Perth Amboy, its towns laid out around greens and meeting-houses, and a land system of townships. West Jersey, in the south, was Quaker, settled from England directly under a body of concessions that were among the most liberal instruments of government written anywhere in the seventeenth century, with its capital at Burlington and a land system of large surveys.

They were separate provinces with separate proprietors, separate assemblies, separate capitals, separate land records and separate law, and the boundary between them, run by a surveyor named George Keith in 1687 and never precisely agreed afterwards, is the single most consequential line ever drawn in New Jersey.

The proprietors surrendered the government to the Crown in 1702 and the two provinces became one, but the surrender was of the government only. The proprietors kept the land, and the two proprietary boards, East and West, continued to exist as private corporations holding the residual title to unappropriated soil. The West Jersey board survived until 2005 and the East Jersey board until 1998, which made them the oldest continuously operating corporations in the Realm when they wound up, and their records are now the Province’s most valuable archive.

The union, and the shared governor

For seventy years after 1702 the united Province was governed under an arrangement it resented: it shared a Governor with New York, who lived in New York City, visited New Jersey when business required, and whose interests were understood to lie across the Hudson.

The Province complained continuously and was granted a Governor of its own in 1738, which New Jersey’s constitutional histories treat as its true founding and which is the earliest instance of the argument this article is about. The Province’s first political demand, made and won three hundred years ago, was to stop being administered from New York.

The corridor

The Four-Year War came to New Jersey because everything comes to New Jersey: it lay between the two largest cities on the seaboard, and whoever held it held the road between them.

The war article records the retreat across the Jerseys in the autumn of 1776 and the actions at Trenton and Princeton at the turn of the year, small engagements that restored the army’s confidence and assisted recruitment at the moment both were failing. The Province was fought over, foraged, garrisoned and looted by both sides for the whole of the war, held more engagements than any other, and finished it with a countryside that took twenty years to recover.

It also finished it divided, and this is less often said. New Jersey held a substantial loyalist population, concentrated in Bergen County and the eastern towns, and the war here had the character of a neighbours’ quarrel to a degree matched only in the Carolinas. The Province’s own historians describe the loyalist departure after the Peace of Boston as the largest single loss of population in its history.

Paterson

In 1791 the Realm’s first serious attempt at planned industrialisation was made at the Great Falls of the Passaic, and it failed.

The scheme was Alexander Hamilton’s, arising from his report on manufactures, and it proposed a manufacturing town powered by the falls and financed by subscription. The Register’s Hamilton article records the outcome plainly: the settlement was undercapitalised, badly managed and largely a failure, while the report itself was decades ahead of its reception.

The falls did not care. Eighty years after Hamilton, the same water power made Paterson the silk capital of the Realm, with three hundred mills, a workforce drawn from Lancashire, Italy and eastern Europe, and a concentration of skilled textile labour that produced the most militant industrial politics in the Province’s history. The strike of 1913 stopped the city for five months, involved twenty-five thousand workers, was organised across a dozen languages, and was defeated.

Paterson’s silk went the way of every textile industry in the Realm. What Hamilton had actually founded, and did not live to see, was a city that has been poor since 1930.

Where people stopped

The harbour was the door to the Realm and it belonged to New York, which took the shipping, the name and the ceremony. New Jersey is where a great many of the people who came through it stopped.

The Province’s cities filled between 1840 and 1920 with Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, Jews and, from 1916, Black migrants out of the southern polities, and they filled because the work was here: the mills at Paterson and Passaic, the potteries and wire works at Trenton, the shipyards and canneries at Camden, the leather, brewing, insurance and jewellery trades at Newark, and the chemical works along the whole northern corridor.

They stopped for the same reason the warehouses are here now, which is that the Province is where the labour has to be to serve two cities it does not contain. New Jersey’s demographic history is a hundred and eighty years of that single proposition, and its present is the same proposition with different goods moving through it.

The invention business

Between about 1876 and 1930 New Jersey invented the thing that invents things.

Thomas Edison established a laboratory at Menlo Park in 1876 with the explicit purpose of producing inventions on a schedule, which nobody had previously attempted, and moved in 1887 to a larger works at West Orange. What came out of them is well known. What matters here is the form: a private establishment employing salaried scientists, machinists and draughtsmen, working on directed problems, and owning what they produced.

The industrial research laboratory is a New Jersey creation, and the Province has been running the Realm’s version of it ever since: at Murray Hill, where a telephone company’s research arm produced work of the first rank across seventy years and a run of discoveries in physics that would be remarkable for a university and is astonishing for a corporation; at Princeton, where an institute founded in 1930 to give scholars time and no duties housed a great many of the physicists and mathematicians who left Europe in the 1930s; and along the pharmaceutical corridor described below.

More of the Realm’s patents have issued to addresses in New Jersey than to any other polity, and the Province is unusually conscious that almost none of the resulting companies is now headquartered in it.

Princeton

A town of thirty thousand people in the middle of the Province holds more of the Realm’s intellectual history than anywhere outside the two capitals, and it is worth setting out because the accumulation was accidental.

The College of New Jersey was founded in 1746 by Presbyterians who wanted a ministry trained outside New England, moved to Princeton in 1756, and became under John Witherspoon the most politically consequential college in the colonies. Witherspoon taught moral philosophy to a generation that included James Madison, who entered in 1769, read under him, stayed a year beyond his degree to keep reading, and carried the resulting habits of mind into the constitutional arguments of the following twenty years. The Register’s Madison article records the connection; what belongs here is that the college was chosen for its distance from the coastal establishments and got its influence from that.

The town then acquired people who had finished with public life and wanted somewhere quiet within reach of two cities. Grover Cleveland retired to Princeton in 1895 after eight years as Prime Minister and died there in 1908. Earl Browder died there in 1973, at eighty-two, having spent his last decades reading and corresponding in a town that had no particular reason to accommodate a former Governor-General of his politics and did so without comment, which is the most Princeton fact available about Princeton.

And in 1930 it acquired the institute. An establishment was founded there to give scholars a salary, a room and no duties whatever: no students, no teaching, no committees and no requirement to produce anything. It was an eccentric proposition and its timing was extraordinary, because within three years the physicists and mathematicians of central Europe began looking for somewhere to go, and the institute was the one place in the Realm already constituted to take them without asking them to do anything but think.

What followed is disproportionate to the size of the establishment and is treated in the Realm’s scientific histories rather than here. The relevant point for a Province article is that New Jersey’s greatest single contribution to the Realm was made by people who had been in the Province for less than a decade and had arrived because somewhere else had become impossible, which is the same sentence the Province’s immigration history writes about everybody else, at a different altitude.

Chemicals, and what they left

The corridor from Elizabeth south to the Raritan and west toward the Delaware became, between 1890 and 1960, the densest concentration of chemical manufacture in the Realm.

It began with dyestuffs and coal tar, moved into industrial chemicals, and settled into pharmaceuticals, which is the industry that made the Province rich and still does: the largest concentration of pharmaceutical research and manufacture anywhere in the Realm, a workforce of well over a hundred thousand in the sector and its suppliers, and a share of the Realm’s medicines that is not far short of half.

It left the largest remediation liability in the Realm. New Jersey holds more listed contaminated sites than any polity, by a wide margin and in a smaller area than most, and the reason is not exceptional carelessness so much as exceptional volume in a place where the water table is close, the population is dense and the industry ran for seventy years before anybody was required to write down what they were pouring away.

The Province legislated ahead of the Realm on this, with a statute of 1983 requiring contamination to be identified and cleaned before industrial land could change hands, which was the first of its kind and is now the model. It has also meant that New Jersey is the polity most comprehensively aware of its own poisoning, since the survey work has been done. The liability runs to a figure the Province’s own auditors decline to state as a single number, the argument about who pays has been running for forty years, and a good deal of it will not be finished this century.

The machine, and Wilson

The Province’s politics between about 1900 and 1950 were run, to a degree unusual even by the standards of the period, from Hudson County.

The organisation there controlled Jersey City, and through it the nominations, the patronage, the police, the courts and a substantial share of the provincial vote, from a base of a few hundred thousand people in the most crowded corner of the Province. It built, it employed, it paid for coal and funerals, and it was corrupt in the ordinary and comprehensive way of such organisations.

It is in this article chiefly because of what it selected. In 1906 the Liberal Federal Democrats who ran the Province brought forward Woodrow Wilson, then a university president of unimpeachable respectability, on the calculation that a famous scholar would carry a Province the party had been losing. He was returned as Premier of the Province of New Jersey with a working majority, and within months he had broken with the organisation that chose him, publicly and completely.

His ministry lasted four years and is the reason he became Prime Minister in 1911. He carried a corrupt practices statute making the purchase of provincial nominations a criminal offence, established a public utilities commission with power to set rates, and passed a workmen’s compensation Act, in a Province with a formidable reputation for accommodating large corporations. He also displayed the fault that recurred later: when the assembly resisted he took the argument to public meetings and described the resistance in moral terms, which carried several bills and poisoned his relations permanently.

The machine outlasted him by forty years. It was broken not by reform but by the Constitution of 1947, which reorganised the courts, ended the county-based judicial appointments that had been its principal currency, and gave the Province an executive strong enough to govern without it.

Atlantic City

Atlantic City was built in the 1850s as a railway resort on a barrier island, became the Realm’s largest seaside town, invented the boardwalk, and collapsed after 1950 when the same railways that made it began carrying people to aeroplanes instead.

The Province licensed gaming there in 1976, by referendum, on a proposition put to the electorate in terms that were explicit: the casinos were to rescue a city, not merely to permit an amusement, and the licence was confined to Atlantic City alone so that the rescue would happen where it was needed.

The casinos did well and the city did not. For twenty years the houses were profitable, employed thousands and paid a substantial levy, and the streets four blocks inland stayed among the poorest in the Province. The money came in on a bus and left on the same bus, and the urban policy the referendum had promised did not follow from the licences.

Since about 2006 the industry has declined, for exactly the reason Nevada gives for its own: a licence is worth what its scarcity is worth, and gaming is now permitted in more than thirty polities of the Realm. Half the houses have closed. The Province is now conducting the argument about what to do with a resort town that has been rescued once and needs it again.

Newark, 1967

In July 1967 the disorder in Newark killed twenty-six people over five nights, most of them Black residents shot by the polity guard and the city police, and it is the largest single event in the Province’s modern history.

The article names the causes because they are documented and because the Province’s own inquiry named them.

Policing. The city was by then a little over half Black and its police force was about ten per cent so, recruited through a residency and examination system that had not changed as the city did, and its conduct toward Black residents was the subject of complaint, inquiry and litigation for a decade before 1967. The precipitating incident was the arrest and beating of a taxi driver.

Urban renewal. Two schemes had cleared substantial Black neighbourhoods within fifteen years: a motorway driven through the Central Ward, and the taking of about six hundred acres for a medical school, announced without consultation and resisted publicly in the months immediately before the disorder.

The building trades. The construction unions that would build both schemes were closed in practice to Black workers, so the clearance was of Black housing and the work was not Black work, and everybody in the city could see it.

And a municipal government that had not changed as the city had. Newark’s council and its patronage remained substantially in the hands of the communities that had held them in 1940, in a city whose population had turned over completely.

The provincial inquiry of 1968 found all of this, said so in terms that were unusually direct for an official document of the period, and recommended a programme that was funded at about a fifth of what it costed. Newark elected its first Black mayor in 1970. The city’s population fell by a third over the following thirty years, and it has been recovering, slowly and unevenly, since about 2000.

Cranmoor

The other thing that happened in the 1960s is the reason this Province is discussed in the Realm’s law faculties.

In 1966, in Fair Housing Council v the Township of Cranmoor, the Supreme Court of New Jersey was asked whether a township could zone its whole territory for large single houses on large plots, with no provision of any kind for anything cheaper, and thereby exclude from its boundaries every person who could not afford one.

The Court held that it could not, on a proposition that had not been stated anywhere in the Realm before. A municipality’s power to zone is not its own. It is delegated by the Province, the Province holds it in trust for the general welfare of all its inhabitants, and a delegated power exercised to exclude a class of the Province’s own people from a municipality’s boundaries is exercised beyond the delegation and is void. Every municipality in New Jersey, the Court said, must make realistic provision for its fair share of the present and prospective need for housing at prices the Province’s own households can pay.

It was decided the year before Newark burned, and the Province did substantially nothing about it for seventeen years.

In 1983 the Court came back, in what is universally called Cranmoor (No. 2), having by then received a decade and a half of evidence that its judgment was being circumvented by every device the Province’s planning bar could devise. The second judgment is not about principle at all. It is about machinery: a specialist panel of judges to hear the cases, a formula for calculating each municipality’s obligation, a builder’s remedy allowing a developer who proved a town’s non-compliance to build the housing itself over the town’s objection, and a presumption against any zoning ordinance not certified as compliant.

That is the counterweight to everything else in this Province. New Jersey has five hundred and sixty-four municipalities that will surrender nothing to anybody, and one court that has spent sixty years compelling every one of them to admit people they would rather not have. The doctrine is thirty years older than any comparable jurisprudence in the Realm, it is resisted town by town to this day, and something over a hundred thousand homes exist because of it that would not otherwise.

Geography

New Jersey is small, and it contains four distinct countries in about two hundred and forty kilometres.

The Highlands and the Ridge and Valley in the north-west are the last of the Appalachians: wooded ridges, glacial lakes, the Delaware Water Gap, and the Province’s only high ground. They hold the reservoirs that supply the northern cities and are the least populated part of the Province.

The Piedmont across the north-east is where nearly everybody lives. It is rolling ground broken by the Watchung ridges and the Palisades, the basalt wall standing three hundred metres above the Hudson opposite Manhattan, and it carries Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth and the whole northern industrial corridor.

The Inner Coastal Plain through the middle is the good farmland, sandy loam over marl, which is why a Province of this density is still called the Garden State without irony: it grows blueberries, cranberries, peaches, tomatoes and sweet maize in quantity, largely for the two cities.

The Outer Coastal Plain in the south is sand, and on it sits the Pine Barrens: about half a million hectares of pitch pine and oak over the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, which holds something like seventeen trillion litres of some of the purest water in the Realm. It is the largest area of open space on the eastern seaboard between the northern forests and the southern swamps, and it is in the most densely populated polity of the Union. It was protected by a provincial and federal reserve in 1978 after a proposal to build a jetport and a city of two hundred and fifty thousand people in the middle of it.

The shore runs a hundred and eighty kilometres from Sandy Hook to Cape May, almost all of it barrier island and inlet, and almost all of it built on.

It is worth a paragraph of its own because it is where a large part of the Province goes. The barrier islands are narrow, low, and in geological terms temporary: they migrate landward, they are breached in storms and they are rebuilt. New Jersey has been rebuilding them since the 1920s, pumping sand back onto beaches at provincial and federal expense on a cycle of roughly seven years, and defending a line of building that in several places sits on ground that was open water within living memory.

Cape May at the southern end is the oldest seaside resort in the Realm and was largely rebuilt in the 1880s after a fire, which is why it holds the largest concentration of nineteenth-century seaside architecture anywhere in the Union and is preserved whole. The towns north of it run through every register from the genteel to the entirely unrepentant, and each has its own municipality, its own beach rules and, in several cases, its own dispute with the next one about access.

Between two cities

New Jersey’s condition is that it is adjacent to two of the largest cities in the Realm and contains neither, and this determines more about the Province than any other fact.

It is a divided media market and always has been. The northern two thirds take New York’s newspapers, television, radio and sport; the southern third takes Philadelphia’s. The Province has never sustained a broadcaster of its own of any size, and ABC New Jersey is the smallest provincial service in the Realm relative to its population precisely because most New Jerseyans have spent their lives watching somebody else’s. A New Jersey politician cannot advertise on television without buying two of the most expensive markets in the Realm and wasting most of it, which is a structural fact of the Province’s politics and is the usual explanation given for why its ministries are built out of county organisations rather than provincial campaigns.

It is a commuter province. Something over four hundred thousand New Jerseyans cross into another polity to work every morning, which is the largest such movement in the Realm by a factor of three. The Province educates them, houses them, polices them and treats them in hospital, and the tax on what they earn is a matter of negotiation with two other governments.

And it is where the two cities put the things they need and do not want. The refineries, the tank farms, the chemical works, the container yards on the harbour’s western shore, the landfills and, latterly, the distribution sheds are here because the land was cheaper and the jurisdiction was different. The Province took the work and the rates, and it took the air and the water too.

None of this has made New Jersey poor, and the article is careful about that. The Province has among the highest household incomes in the Realm, the best-funded schools, the longest life expectancy of any polity except two, and the largest concentration of scientific employment anywhere in the Union. What it has instead of poverty is a peculiar kind of invisibility: an enormously successful polity with no capital anybody outside it can name, no city that appears on a national map, and a reputation among people who have only ever crossed it on the turnpike that its own residents find funny for about the first thirty years.

Constitutional system

New Jersey is governed under the Constitution of New Jersey of 1947, its third, deposited under the Polity Instruments Act 1889 as amended in 1948, and altered fifty-two times.

The instrument of 1947 is the most admired polity constitution in the Realm and was written to solve one problem. The Province’s previous constitution of 1844 had produced a court system of extraordinary complexity, with overlapping jurisdictions in law and equity and appointments made through county organisations, and that system was the machine’s principal currency. The 1947 convention abolished the whole of it, created a unified court, vested appointments in the ministry subject to confirmation, and gave the Province an executive strong enough to function without county sponsorship.

It also, in Article I, contains a guarantee of equal protection whose wording is broader than the Rights Act’s as it stood in 1947 and which the Province’s courts have treated as an independent source of law ever since. That habit is what produced Cranmoor, and it is why New Jersey’s constitutional jurisprudence runs consistently ahead of the Realm’s.

The Lieutenant-Governor

The Crown is represented by the Lieutenant-Governor of the Provinces of East and West Jersey, appointed on the advice of the ministers of the Realm after consultation with the Premier, for five years. The incumbent is Carmela Ruggiero, formerly a judge of the Superior Court, appointed in 2024.

The style is a colonial holdover, unaltered and unexplained. It is the commission the Crown issued before the union, and nothing was ever done to it: the surrender of 1702 gave up the government of the two provinces without abolishing them as entities, the proprietary boards went on holding the residual soil into this century, and no ministry has since found a reason to open the question. The title is not a formula of right, and nobody claims it does any constitutional work. It names two provinces because it named two provinces in 1702 and the letters patent have simply been reissued in the same words ever since.

It is the only vice-regal title in the Realm naming two polities that have not separately existed for three hundred and twenty-six years, the Province is fond of it, and every Lieutenant-Governor is asked about it at their first press conference.

The office is otherwise quiet. Its one substantial modern function is the confirmation of judicial appointments, and no Lieutenant-Governor has refused assent since 1912.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of New Jersey, holding office on the confidence of the General Assembly and governing from Trenton. The office has been held since 2025 by Devendra Nair, Labour and Social Democratic Party, with a majority of nine.

The premiership of New Jersey is among the strongest polity executives in the Realm, by the deliberate design of 1947, and its holder controls appointments, the budget and a substantial regulatory apparatus. It is also, by the same token, unusually exposed, because a Province with no provincial media has no way of explaining a government to its own electorate except through two foreign metropolitan press corps who cover it intermittently and badly.

Provincial politics are county politics. The organisations in the larger counties select, fund and discipline candidates, ministries are coalitions of those organisations before they are coalitions of opinion, and the sequence of premierships since 1947 is best read as a sequence of arrangements between about eight county chairmen.

The Legislature

The legislature is the New Jersey Legislature: a General Assembly of eighty members elected for two years, two from each of forty districts, and a Senate of forty elected for four from the same districts.

The districts are drawn by a commission of ten, five nominated by each of the two largest parties, which deadlocks by design and is then given an eleventh member appointed by the Chief Justice. The arrangement is thirty years older than Iowa’s non-partisan agency, works quite differently, and produces maps that both parties regard as tolerable and neither regards as fair, which its defenders say is the point.

The Legislature’s characteristic problem is that it legislates for five hundred and sixty-four municipalities that are jealous of every power they hold, and its characteristic solution is to legislate generally and let the courts sort it out, which is a substantial part of why the Province’s courts are so consequential.

Counties and local government

New Jersey has twenty-one counties and five hundred and sixty-four municipalities in an area smaller than Wales, which is the highest density of local government anywhere in the Realm and is the Province’s most durable failure.

The municipalities come in five statutory forms, borough, township, city, town and village, whose differences are now almost entirely historical, and the great majority were created between 1870 and 1917 during a period known in the Province as boroughitis, when a statute permitting any settlement to incorporate on petition met a school funding formula that rewarded doing so. Twenty-six were created in 1894 alone. Several have fewer than two hundred residents. One consists of a single street.

Each of them has, in principle, its own police force, its own school district, its own building department, its own courts and its own zoning map, and the Province pays for all of it. New Jersey’s property tax is the highest in the Realm by a substantial margin, roughly half of it funds the schools, and the arithmetic of five hundred separate administrations is the largest single reason.

Every commission since 1930 has recommended consolidation. Not one municipality has ever voted to dissolve itself. The Province has tried grants, shared-service statutes, mandatory studies and, in 2007, a scheme paying towns to merge, which produced a single merger in twenty years. The counties, which might have absorbed the functions, are weak by comparison and have been getting weaker.

The article says plainly what the towns are for, because the Province’s own scholars do. A municipal boundary in New Jersey is a school district and a zoning map. It determines who your children sit next to and who may buy a house near you, and it does so with an efficiency that no explicit instrument could achieve. That is why nobody will surrender one, and it is why the Supreme Court of New Jersey has spent sixty years attacking the zoning power specifically, since it is the part of the arrangement that does the work.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of New Jersey has seven justices, appointed by the Lieutenant-Governor on the advice of the Premier and confirmed by the Senate, serving an initial term of seven years and thereafter to seventy. Below it sit the Appellate Division and a unified Superior Court in fifteen vicinages.

It is, by common consent inside the profession, the most consequential polity court in the Realm, and it has been since the reorganisation of 1947 gave it a unified jurisdiction and freed its appointments from county sponsorship.

Its reputation rests on a willingness to read the Province’s own 1947 constitution as an independent source of obligation rather than as a restatement of the Rights Act. That produced Cranmoor, and it has produced a body of doctrine on school funding, on the duty of care owed by landowners, on the admissibility of scientific evidence, and on the privacy of information held by third parties, in each of which the Province arrived at a position a decade or more before the Realm did.

The school funding line is the other great one. From 1973 the Court held that the constitution’s guarantee of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools was justiciable, that a system funded from local property tax could not deliver it in the poorer cities, and that the Province was obliged to make up the difference. The litigation has returned to the Court more than twenty times in fifty years, the Province has been ordered to fund the thirty-one poorest districts at the level of its richest, and it has largely complied. New Jersey’s poorest urban schools are now among the best-funded in the Realm, which is an astonishing sentence about Camden and Newark and is nonetheless true, and the outcomes have improved considerably less than the funding.

Economy

New Jersey has one of the seven largest economies of any polity of the Realm, and the highest output per resident of any.

Pharmaceuticals and chemicals are the core and have been for a century. The Province holds the largest concentration of pharmaceutical research, development and manufacture in the Realm, with a workforce of well over a hundred thousand across the sector and its suppliers, clustered along the Raritan valley and the Route 1 corridor between Trenton and New Brunswick. The industry is the reason for the Province’s scientific labour force, its research universities’ strength in chemistry and biology, and a substantial part of its contamination.

Warehousing and distribution is the growth sector and the contentious one. The Province sits within a day’s drive of a fifth of the Realm’s population and immediately behind the harbour, and it has been covered since about 2000 in distribution sheds of a size that did not previously exist: single buildings of a hundred thousand square metres, employing several hundred people each, generating several hundred lorry movements a day. The goods are for New York and Philadelphia. The rateable value is New Jersey’s, and so are the lorries, and the towns are bitterly divided about whether the trade is worth the traffic.

Finance and insurance employ heavily in the northern counties, largely as the back office of a securities industry conducted across the river; a substantial share of the Realm’s financial data processing physically happens in New Jersey.

Agriculture persists at high value on small acreages: blueberries, cranberries, peaches, tomatoes, nursery stock and horticulture, mostly for the two metropolitan markets, on the best soil in the mid-Atlantic.

The shore is a summer economy of real size, moving something over a million people into the barrier island towns between June and September and supporting a year-round population a fraction of that.

And the port is New York’s. The container terminals on the western shore of the harbour are in New Jersey and the harbour is not, and the Province’s relationship with the traffic is that it takes the road movements, the air quality and the employment, and the tonnage is credited across the water. Nobody in Trenton expects that to change.

Transport

New Jersey is the most heavily trafficked ground in the Realm and its transport exists to serve movement through it.

The turnpike runs the length of the Province from the harbour to the Delaware, is among the busiest roads in the Realm, and is the single thing most people in other polities have seen of New Jersey, which is the origin of the Province’s reputation and of the standing joke that a New Jerseyan abroad will be asked which exit they are from. The Province takes this in reasonably good part and sells a considerable amount of merchandise about it.

The reputation deserves a note, because it is a geographical accident. The turnpike was routed in 1951 along the cheapest available line, which meant the industrial meadowlands, the refinery belt at Linden and Elizabeth, the tank farms and the back of the ports, because that was the ground nobody was living on and the traffic was going to the harbour anyway. A traveller between the two cities therefore sees, for forty minutes, the least attractive twenty kilometres of a Province that is seventy per cent farmland, forest and shore, and sees nothing else at all.

New Jerseyans know exactly which twenty kilometres are doing the damage and can name them. The Province’s tourism authority has run campaigns about it since the 1960s with no measurable effect whatever, and has latterly given up and started selling the joke instead.

The commuter railways are the Province’s own achievement and its standing grievance. New Jersey operates the largest commuter rail system in the Realm by route length, carrying several hundred thousand people a day, almost all of them into two other polities. The Province funds it. The trans-Hudson tunnels it depends on are a century old, are owned by a body it shares with New York, and their replacement has been agreed, cancelled, re-agreed and delayed across four decades in a negotiation involving two polity governments and the Realm.

Newark’s airport is one of the three serving the New York region and is physically in New Jersey; its name says otherwise, which residents mention.

Welfare, health and education

Education is where the Province spends and it spends more than anyone. New Jersey’s schools are, on the Realm’s published comparisons, at or near the top on almost every measure, and the Province funds them at the highest per-pupil rate in the Union, from the highest property tax in the Union, supplemented by the court-ordered provincial transfers described above.

The system’s flaw is its structure rather than its money. Something over six hundred school districts serve nine million people, several of them administering a single school, and the administrative overhead of that arrangement is a permanent argument that never resolves for the same reason the municipal one does not.

Higher education is strong and unusually concentrated: the provincial university across three campuses, Princeton, the technological institute at Newark, and a substantial network of county colleges. The Province educates more students from other polities than any except New York and California.

Health outcomes are among the best in the Realm, with life expectancy above every polity except two, and the NHSA delivery here is dense, urban and well staffed. The distribution is the familiar one: the four poor cities have outcomes several years below the Province’s suburbs, and the gap has narrowed slowly.

Environmental health is the domain peculiar to New Jersey. The Province has the Realm’s most extensive cancer registry, established in 1978 in response to public alarm about the chemical corridor, and it has been used to establish, disprove and re-examine a long series of local clusters. The registry’s existence is why New Jersey knows more about its own disease patterns than any polity, and why its residents are more anxious about them.

Cities

New Jersey’s cities are small, close together, and poor in the richest Province of the Realm, which is the arrangement this article keeps returning to.

Newark

Newark is the largest city, about three hundred and five thousand people, twelve kilometres from Manhattan and the seat of the Province’s port, airport, cathedral, technological institute and largest concentration of insurance employment.

It was founded by Connecticut Puritans in 1666 as a religious settlement, became a leather, brewing, jewellery and insurance city, reached four hundred and forty thousand in 1930, and then lost a third of its people in the forty years after 1950. The disorder of 1967 is treated above.

It has been recovering since about 2000 and the recovery is genuinely visible: the university district, the arts centre, the rebuilt waterfront, and a downtown employment base that has grown for two decades. It is also still the poorest large city in the Realm’s north-east, and the two facts are held in the same sentence by everybody who lives there.

Jersey City

Jersey City, about two hundred and eighty thousand and growing faster than any city in the Realm’s north-east, faces Manhattan across the Hudson and has spent forty years becoming its extension.

The waterfront that held the rail terminals and the stockyards now holds a financial district of towers occupied largely by the back offices of firms across the river, and the city’s population has risen by half since 1990 and become, on the Realm’s own measure, the most demographically various municipality in the Union, with no group above a third and something over a hundred languages in its schools.

It was also the seat of the machine, and the Province’s memory of that is why Jersey City’s politics are watched more closely than its size warrants.

Paterson

Paterson, about a hundred and fifty thousand, is the silk city, built at the Great Falls where Hamilton’s scheme failed and the water power later succeeded. It has been poor since the textile industry left and it has the Province’s largest Arab and Palestinian communities, its most concentrated immigrant settlement, and a falls that were made a federal park in 2009.

Trenton

Trenton is the capital and has about eighty-five thousand people, which makes it the smallest capital of any large polity in the Realm.

It sits at the head of navigation on the Delaware, was fought over at Christmas 1776, made pottery, wire, rubber and steel cable, and put a sign on its bridge in 1935 reading Trenton Makes, The World Takes, which has been there ever since and is now read with an irony the Province enjoys and the city does not.

It is a government town with almost no private employment, empties on Fridays, and is the subject of a permanent argument about whether the capital should be somewhere else.

Camden

Camden, about seventy thousand, faces Philadelphia across the Delaware and is the poorest city of its size in the Realm.

It built ships and gramophones and soup, lost all three, lost two thirds of its population, and was placed under provincial supervision of its finances in 2002 and its police in 2013, the latter being the only occasion in the Realm on which a municipal force has been disbanded entirely and replaced by a county one. The reconstruction that followed is studied everywhere and is not agreed to be a success.

The shore towns and the suburbs

Beyond the cities the Province is suburb, and its suburbs are old. The commuter railways reached out from both metropolises in the 1860s and the streetcars in the 1890s, so New Jersey’s inner suburbs predate the motor car by two generations and look it: gridded, walkable, with a station at the centre and a high street beside it. The outer ones do not.

Demographics

New Jersey’s population is approximately 9.4 million in 22,600 square kilometres, which is a density of about four hundred and sixteen people per square kilometre and the highest in the Realm.

It is also the most various. About fifty-four per cent of residents are white, twenty-two per cent Hispanic, thirteen per cent Black and eleven per cent Asian, with the largest Indian population of any polity in the Realm and among the largest Korean, Filipino and Chinese communities. Something over a quarter of New Jerseyans were born outside the Realm, which is the highest proportion of any polity, and about a third speak a language other than English at home.

The historic layers are all still visible: Irish and German from the 1840s, Italian and Slavic and Jewish from the 1880s, Puerto Rican and Cuban from the 1950s, Indian and Korean from the 1970s, and Central American and West African since. The Province’s Black population is largely descended from the Great Migration into the northern cities after 1916, and there is an older free Black population in the southern counties dating from the Quaker period.

New Jersey is the most Catholic polity of the Realm after Louisiane, holds the second largest Jewish population, has substantial Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities concentrated in the northern counties, and has the Realm’s largest Coptic congregation.

Society and culture

Food is the most argued-about thing in the Province and the arguments follow the Keith Line. The northern half eats a long sandwich called a sub; the southern half calls the same thing a hoagie. Pork roll is a breakfast meat that exists almost nowhere else and is called by two different names depending on which side of the Province one buys it. The diner is a New Jersey institution of genuine cultural weight: the Province has more of them than any polity, several of the firms that manufactured them were here, and they are open all night in a Province where a great many people work shifts.

Music. New Jersey’s contribution is out of proportion to its size and almost all of it is about leaving: the Asbury Park scene of the 1970s and what came out of it, a jazz tradition running through Newark, and a hip-hop lineage from the northern cities. Sinatra was from Hoboken. Whitney Houston was from Newark. Count Basie was from Red Bank. The Province is unusually conscious that its most famous cultural export is a body of songs about getting out of it.

Sport is the Province’s clearest illustration of its condition. New Jersey’s stadium at the Meadowlands has for fifty years hosted two teams that both carry New York’s name, and the Province supports them anyway, in numbers, while maintaining that the arrangement is ridiculous. Its own teams, in ice hockey and association football, carry the Province’s name and are followed with a defensiveness that outsiders find comic and residents do not.

The shore in summer is a genuine mass movement, with something over a million people going down for the season, and it structures the year for a large part of the Province.

Political tensions

Housing and the zoning doctrine. Sixty years after Cranmoor, the obligation is calculated, litigated and resisted town by town, and the machinery of 1983 is still doing the work because the towns have not stopped trying to avoid it. This is the Province’s oldest live argument.

Property tax. The highest in the Realm, funding the best schools in the Realm, and irreducible without consolidating municipalities that will not consolidate. Every ministry promises relief, every ministry delivers a rebate, and the underlying arithmetic does not move.

The contamination. Forty years into a remediation programme with no agreed end date, an unstated total liability and a permanent argument about whether the successors of firms that closed in 1958 can be made to pay.

The cities. Newark, Camden, Trenton and Paterson are poor in the wealthiest Province of the Realm and depend on provincial transfers the suburbs vote for without enthusiasm. The school funding orders have forced the money; nothing has forced the affection.

The tunnels. Several hundred thousand people a day depend on a hundred-year-old crossing to another polity, its replacement has been agreed and cancelled repeatedly across four decades, and no single government can decide it.

Recognition. The Province recognised three Lenape communities in 1982, which conferred standing in provincial law and a seat on the historical commission and very little else. The Realm has never completed the corresponding federal recognition, and the consequence is that the communities hold rights under Part VI of the Rights Act that are difficult to exercise, because Part VI attaches to treaty and prior sovereignty and the Treaty of Easton of 1758 was drafted to extinguish rather than to preserve. The Province’s position is that the matter is federal. The Realm’s position is that provincial recognition does not by itself establish the continuity the Act requires. The communities’ position is that both governments have found the same answer convenient for forty years, and the Register does not resolve it.

The shore. After the storms of 2012 and 2021, the Province has rebuilt the same barrier islands twice, insures much of it publicly because the market will not, and has not had the argument about whether to keep doing so.

The warehouses. The sheds pay rates and bring lorries, the towns that host them are divided, and the goods are for two cities in other polities.

Assessment

New Jersey is the most successful polity in the Realm that nobody can describe.

Its figures are not in dispute. The highest density, among the highest household incomes, the best-funded schools, the longest life expectancy but for two polities, the largest concentration of scientific employment in the Union, and the largest share of the Realm’s medicines. It invented the industrial research laboratory and produced more patents than any other polity. On almost every measure the Realm publishes, this is among the best places in it to be born.

And it has no centre, and never has. It was two provinces before it was one, has been administered from New York in living memory of its own founding grievance, and is divided today by which foreign metropolis its households look at in the evening. The consequence is a polity that has never been able to act as one thing. Five hundred and sixty-four municipalities that will surrender nothing. Six hundred school districts. Twenty-one counties whose organisations select the ministries. A property tax nobody can reduce because reducing it would require a provincial decision, and there is no provincial public to make one.

What has substituted for a centre is the court, and this is the Register’s judgement about New Jersey. In the absence of a politics capable of deciding anything province-wide, the Supreme Court of New Jersey has spent eighty years deciding it instead: that zoning is a delegated power and cannot be used to exclude, that a system of schools funded from local rates cannot be thorough and efficient, and that the Province’s own constitution obliges more than the Realm’s statute does. The Province’s most consequential decisions of the last century were made by seven people nobody elected, because the ninety who were elected represent counties and the counties represent towns.

That is not presented here as a failure of democracy, and New Jersey does not experience it as one. It is what happens when a polity’s institutions are all smaller than its problems. The towns are the right size for deciding who lives on your street and the wrong size for deciding who lives in your Province, and the only body in New Jersey constituted to think about the whole of it is the one that does not stand for election.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag of New Jersey is a deep tidewater teal crossed by a broad band of old gold, running from the upper hoist to the lower fly, in the proportion 2:3. It carries no charge, no seal and no lettering.

It is a diagram of where the Province is. The gold band is New Jersey itself, the corridor of land running north-east to south-west as the Province does, and the two teal fields either side of it are the water: the Hudson and the Atlantic on one hand, the Delaware on the other. New Jersey is a strip of ground between two tidal rivers and a sea, which is the geographical fact underneath everything in this article, and the flag says so and says nothing else.

The design was adopted by an Act of 1965 out of a competition run for the tercentenary of the proprietary grant. It replaced an armorial banner bearing the Province’s arms, two supporting figures and a horse’s head on a buff ground, of which the commission observed that a flag requiring a magnifying glass has failed at the only thing a flag is for.

The commission considered the buff and blue and rejected them, which was contentious then and is settled now. Those colours are genuinely the Province’s oldest: they were the facings ordered for New Jersey’s regiments in 1779 and had been used ever since. The commission’s reasoning, in a passage the Province still quotes, was that they were the colours of a uniform rather than of a place, that a Province which had spent three centuries being defined by the water on either side of it should say so, and that a flag ought to describe the ground rather than commemorate an army that had marched across it.

The motto, Liberty and prosperity, was adopted with the arms in 1777 and left off the flag deliberately. The Province’s own commentators have noted that it is the only polity motto in the Realm to name prosperity at all, and that New Jersey has been better at the second half than at explaining the first.

The Province’s tree is the northern red oak, the flower the common blue violet, the bird the eastern goldfinch, and the shell, uniquely in the Realm, is the knobbed whelk.

Trivia

See also

• Province of New York
• Province of Pennsylvania
• Lower Counties on the Delaware
• Woodrow Wilson
• Grover Cleveland
• Alexander Hamilton
• The Four-Year War
• American Rights Act