Hon. Margaret H. Marshall Receives ACS Lifetime Achievement Award

Hon. Margaret H. Marshall, Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, is awarded the 2018 ACS Lifetime Achievement Award at #ACS2018. Introduced by Janson Wu, Executive Director, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.

Margaret H. Marshall served for eleven years as Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. She was the first woman to hold that position in the Court’s history. Chief Justice Marshall is presently a senior research fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School and serves as Senior Counsel at Choate, Hall & Stewart, where she focuses on community outreach, pro bono and diversity programs, mentors lawyers and provides senior level counsel to clients on special projects. During her fourteen years on the Supreme Judicial Court, Chief Justice Marshall wrote numerous, groundbreaking opinions, including the 2003 decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which declared that the Massachusetts Constitution prohibits the state from denying same-sex couples access to civil marriage. The ruling made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage. She is recognized as a champion for an independent judiciary and as a leader in the promotion of administrative reforms within the judicial branch. A long-time advocate of access to justice for all, she implemented innovative procedures for selfrepresented litigants and strengthened pro bono services by the bar. Prior to her service on the Supreme Judicial Court, Marshall was in private practice for sixteen years, before joining Harvard University as Vice President and General Counsel. Marshall served as President of the Boston Bar Association and as President of the United States Conference of Chief Justices. She is a member of the council of the American Law Institute, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as a Fellow of the Corporation of Yale University, the governing board and policymaking body for the University, and was subsequently appointed Senior Fellow, the first woman to hold that position. The ACS Boston Lawyer Chapter annually bestows it’s Margaret H. Marshall Leadership Award on a member of the Boston legal community who best embodies ACS’s mission. Marshall is a graduate of Witwatersrand University (Johannesburg, South Africa), Harvard University, and Yale Law School.