Former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Margaret Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, Ed ’77, L ’78, will serve as senior counsel for Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP and will be joining the faculty at the Law School this spring as a senior research fellow and lecturer, reports the Boston Globe.
Marshall, who served as the University’s vice president and general counsel from 1992 to 1996, when she was named to the state’s highest court, will focus her efforts on the firm's extensive community outreach and pro bono and diversity programs while mentoring junior lawyers and providing senior-level counsel to clients on special projects. (She was a partner at Choate from 1989 to 1992, prior to her Harvard service.) She announced her retirement from the court last July, stating that she was stepping down to spend more time with her husband, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis ’48, NF ’57, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
“Choate is a spectacularly talented law firm, and I look forward to rejoining my many friends here,” Marshall said in a statement to the media. “Choate and I have many shared values, including a deep respect for the rule of law and the important role it plays in the lives of individuals, in organizations, and in our society.”
During her 14 years on the Supreme Judicial Court, Marshall wrote more than 300 opinions, many of them ground-breaking, including the historic case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts. “The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals,’’ she wrote at that time. “It forbids the creation of second-class citizens.’’
Marshall earned a bachelor’s degree in 1966 from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she was a student leader in South Africa’s antiapartheid movement. Both Marshall and Lewis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who served as an Undergraduate columnist of this magazine, are Harvard Magazine Incorporators.
