The new contract also requires Legal Aid to set aside lawyers to handle only arraignments, the initial court proceedings where defendants enter pleas and have bail hearings.

Mayoral aides said they had been in contact with administrators of the city's courts and would have additional private lawyers on hand today to handle arraignments.

Years ago, many of the lawyers who handled first arraignments often waited outside the courts jockeying among themselves in a kind of legal bazaar in the hope that a lawyerless defendant would hire them.

But I'm proud of handling arraignments because if it wasn't for lawyers like me practicing meat and potatoes law those people inside over there would never have a lawyer who really knows how to get them out.

But today's calendar for Federal District Judge Morris E. Lasker, who is handling arraignments and pleadings, listed Mr. Boesky to appear.

He was back in the Federal system, as a magistrate judge in Brooklyn, handling criminal arraignments, pretrial civil proceedings and the like, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended in March that President Clinton nominate him as United States Attorney.

Starting in April 1986, its lawyers, who every year represent thousands of indigent criminal defendants, refused to handle most arraignments.

Police officials attributed the increase in desk tickets in the last two years mainly to an attempt to cut police overtime and congestion in courts handling arraignments.

He currently handling arraignments at the Criminal Court.

Judge Laura A. Ward, an acting State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan who is Jewish, said she always volunteered to handle arraignments on Christmas.