Due diligence at the SJC
IT DOESN’T get much sleepier at the State House than the last Friday before Labor Day. But a momentous decision will be made today over whether to seat a new member of the Supreme Judicial Court. We hope the Governor’s Council agrees with the many testimonials to Superior Court judge Margot Botsford’s extraordinary qualities and will approve her nomination.
Because Massachusetts, happily, doesn’t force its judges to stand for popular election or recall, and because the mandatory retirement age is 70, a governor’s appointments to the bench are among his most enduring decisions. The SJC vacancy is the first judicial appointment for Governor Patrick, so the Botsford nomination says something about him, too.
It says he is going to look for judicial nominees who have broad experience — Botsford served as a Middlesex County prosecutor and in the attorney general’s office before Governor Dukakis appointed her to the bench.
It says he will seek someone with a probing intellect and profound work ethic — the report she was tasked to write to the SJC in 2005 about education funding weighed in at 350 pages. And even though the court declined to intervene in the state’s funding formula, as Botsford had recommended, the justices took pains to praise her thoroughness and clarity. She will have the respect of her colleagues on the state’s highest court.
And it says Patrick is not going to apply any particular litmus test to his choices, but neither is he going to shy away from someone who sees the country’s oldest constitution as a living document. Patrick said ‘‘a respect for precedent and an understanding of the history that motivates the constitution’’ were important qualities, but he recognized there were some situations the founders could not have anticipated. In such cases, justices need to rely on their legal acumen and humanity, and Botsford has a surplus of both.
One small insight into Botsford’s humanity is what she did on sabbatical, in 2001. She volunteered for seven months with Citizen Schools in Boston, the after-school enrichment program, expanding its offerings to eighth-graders and organizing other lawyers at some of the city’s most prestigious firms into a volunteer corps of writing coaches.
Botsford’s mentor was SJC justice Francis Quirico, for whom she clerked in 1973. Quirico was a towering legal mind known for a philosophy of judicial restraint. At a memorial service for him in 2000, Botsford said: ‘‘I knew after about six weeks on the job, just watching and being with the judge, that what I wanted to do in life was to become a judge myself, and I spent the next 16 years after my clerkship ended trying to figure out work experiences that would give me a chance to apply.’’ That speaks to Quirico’s influence, but also to Botsford’s own diligence.
