Margaret Marshall

“We present the Radcliffe Medal to an individual who has been a powerful and impressive force for change, someone who takes risks and forges ahead. These are hallmarks of Radcliffe.” Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, made this statement in announcing that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, is this year’s Radcliffe Medal recipient...Moderated by Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, a former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, a senior research fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and the 2012 Radcliffe Medalist, “A Decade of Decisions and Dissents” will feature the following panelists: Linda Greenhouse ’68, Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School, and former Supreme Court correspondent, The New York Times; Michael Klarman, Kirkland & Ellis Professor, Harvard Law School; Lauren Sudeall Lucas, J.D. ’05, assistant professor of law, Georgia State University College of Law; John Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, Bruce Bromley Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.

Add another tribute to the long list of them heaped on Margaret Marshall...over the course of her career. Monday night, the former chief justice of the state’s highest court received the 2014 “We Are Boston Leadership Award,” which honors people and organizations that embrace diversity and immigrant heritage. Marshall, of course, is a native of South Africa and wrote the 2003 Supreme Judicial Court opinion that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. She was also the first female general counsel of Harvard University.

Margaret Marshall, the former chief justice of the highest court in Massachusetts has been selected to receive an award honoring the accomplishments of people and organizations who embrace diversity. The "We Are Boston Leadership Award" will be presented by Boston Mayor Martin Walsh on Monday at the We Are Boston gala.

Time flies. It’s four years since Margaret Marshall retired as chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and we haven’t heard much from her in the interim. It’s less than two years since Tony Lewis died, and there’s so much we should have heard from him in that time...She spoke about something she and her husband loved almost as much as each other: the First Amendment. “Tony had strong feelings — very strong — about the First Amendment, about law, justice, and liberty,” she said. “Tony spent a great deal of time with judges and lawyers. It was a close call, but in the end, I think Tony admired journalists more than he admired lawyers and judges.” She paused, as lawyers are wont to do, before adding, “But he did marry a judge.”

Long before there was a United States Supreme Court, before there was even a United States of America, the court today known as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld the law of the land here in the Bay State. Fifteen years ago, for the first time in the court's 300-plus year history, a woman was elevated to serve as chief justice. Perhaps the word that best describes Margaret Marshall’s rise to chief justice of the oldest continuously functioning appellate court in the Western Hemisphere is “improbable.” Marshall was born and raised in small town in Apartheid-era South Africa.

The American Bar Association will honor Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, with its Thurgood Marshall Award at its annual meeting in Boston. The award recognizes members of the legal profession for long-term contributions to advancing civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights in the United States.

By Margaret H. Marshall. During the long years that I was unable to return to South Africa, where I was born, raised, and lived for the first 25 years of my life, I could spend time with Nadine Gordimer only when she visited Boston. She often stayed with close friends of hers in their home on a quiet, leafy street, close to the center of Harvard. She seemed to thrive during those visits, tasting the freedom that we who are privileged to live here too often take for granted. It was a response I knew well: I had endured the offensive restrictions of apartheid, and breathed deeply on my few visits to the United States before I settled here.

In 1983, Evan Wolfson ’83 authored a prescient third year paper titled “Samesex Marriage and Morality: The Human Rights Vision of the Constitution.” Thirty years…