Nicholas P. Papadakos

Nicholas P. Papadakos (January 24, 1925 in Hoboken, New Jersey - September 11, 2017 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania)[1] was a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice who served eleven years on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, retiring in 1995, and eight years as an Allegheny County judge before that. He earned a reputation for being forceful and decisive with an eye for the average citizen, and was also noted as someone "who applied common sense to rulings."[2]

One of his proudest moments came during the steel industry collapse in 1983, when as an administrative law judge in the civil division of common pleas court he made national headlines by stopping mortgage foreclosures for the suddenly unemployed.

In one Philadelphia Inquirer poll from that time, one hundred lawyers and judges from across the state ranked him last among the seven Supreme Court justices in intelligence, temperament, and legal knowledge. He had also been attacked for spending too much time at his condominium in Florida, putting his son on the payroll as his law clerk, paying too much for fancy hotels, and rebuking any lawyer who dared to call him "Judge" and not "Justice."[2]

PITTSBURGH (UPl, Jan 1983) – A local judge, in a move being said harkens back to the days of the Depression, Wednesday slapped a temporary freeze on defaulted mortgage loans of owner-occupied homes in the recession-battered Pittsburgh area. Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Nicholas Papadakos, who expects the moratorium to last "at least several months," said he took the action because of the "excruciatingly painful" plight of the area's jobless homeowners. Unemployment is at 14.1 percent in the Pittsburgh area, hit hard by the worst steel industry slump in fifty years. Some 35,000 steelworkers ore laid off in the area, with 20,000 mortgages in default in Allegheny County.[3]