John S. Watson Institute for Public Policy John S. Watson Institute for Public Policy The John S. Watson Institute for Public Policy is an American non-partisan research institute on public policy located at Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, New Jersey. The Institute is named after New Jersey Assemblyman John S. Watson, the first African American to serve as the state's Chairman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Thomas Edison State College established the institute in response to the expressed needs of decision-makers across New Jersey to have a resource for researching public policy. The approach of the institute is to apply the resources of higher education to
James S. Watson and, together with Charles E. Toney, also elected that year, thus became one of the first two black judges in New York state. He served as a judge until his retirement in 1950. He faced a particularly tough re-election campaign in 1940 when Tammany Hall denied Watson the position of Democratic nominee in spite of Watson's being endorsed by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Tammany Hall eventually relented and Watson was given the nomination and won re-election by a margin of nine-to-one. In 1943, Watson was the first African American to become a new