Mayor Bloomberg opened the year by joining with Senator Schumer to pronounce that “the prevalence of merit-less securities lawsuits and settlements in the U.S. has driven up the apparent and actual cost of business — and driven away potential investors” and to say that “securities litigation reform” — including a possible limit on punitive damages — was a “critically important” near term priority.

Well, as the year end approaches, Mr. Bloomberg has been flying around the country and the world making the case for gun control and against global warming, but his campaign for securities litigation reform has amounted to a whimper. Even worse, Mr. Bloomberg, via the New York City Employee Retirement System board whose chairmanship he controls and the city law department that represents it, has been pursuing a merit-less securities lawsuit of its own.

We refer to the NYCERS suit against Apple, the computer, phone, and music player company whose stock has nearly quintupled in value since 2005. When even companies that perform so well for their shareholders are having to fight off this sort of litigation, it just proves Mr. Bloomberg’s case about the prevalence of meritless securities lawsuits.

Not that the NYCERS board is keeping much of an eye on its lawyers. As reporting by The New York Sun has shown, that board consists largely of absentee trustees, as the actual trustees can’t be bothered to attend the board meetings. With astonishing frequency, send underlings in their stead. NYCERS’s case against Apple isn’t even being handled by the city law department, but by an outside law firm that makes political contributions of the sort that the city’s top lawyer, corporation counsel Michael Cardozo, cast a skeptical eye on back when he was heading the city bar association.

Don’t just take our word for it — a federal judge in California, Jeremy Fogel, last month dismissed the city’s case against Apple. Instead of dropping it there, the NYCERS board and the city law department and their outside class-action lawyers-for-hire have decided to keep pursuing the case. If Mr. Bloomberg wants to pursue securities litigation reform, he needn’t take his case to Washington; he could start with this case in which he is effectively the plaintiff.

When we’ve made this point in the past, the mayor’s camp has made noises about how it has a fiduciary duty to pursue these sorts of cases. That’s nonsense promoted by the class-action lawyers who stand to gain enormous fees on the off chance that one of these cases succeeds. In our opinion, New York has a fiduciary responsibility to drop the case and stop forcing Apple shareholders, which include New York pension funds, to spend money defending themselves from this litigation that a judge has already ruled is baseless. Certainly the judge’s order dismissing the case demonstrates that New York has no responsibility to pursue it further. The case of the Big Apple versus Apple has been a rotten apple from day one.