Judge Marilyn M. Sullivan, 83; a trailblazer for women in Bay State's courts

The word "pioneer" recurs again and again when colleagues recall Marilyn M. Sullivan, the first woman to serve as chief justice of the Mas s achusetts Land Court and the first female chief justice in the trial courts of the Commonwealth.

Judge Sullivan was remembered as a trailblazer for women in law as well as for her astute opinions written on land use, an area that might seem mundane compared to the blood-and-guts fare of criminal law but often involved emotions just as raw. An exasperated litigant once threw his overcoat out the window of her top-floor courtroom in Pemberton Square, said her sister, Joan, with whom she lived in Quincy and West Harwich.

Judge Sullivan died Tuesday in Brigham and Women's Hospital of congestive heart failure. She was 83.

"As the first female jurist in Massachusetts to have the title of chief justice, she truly was a pioneer and role model for generations of lawyers," said Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall in an e - mail. "Chief Justice Sullivan was very generous with attorneys newly admitted to the bar and was supportive of all lawyers, both men and women. She will be missed."

Ruth Abrams, a former SJC justice , described her as "a pioneer when women were not accepted into the law."

Gaining acceptance was not easy, Judge Sullivan wrote in a legal newsletter, Landletter, in 1993, the year she retired. In 1946, when she was entering law school, she could not apply to Harvard.

"Unbelievable to people today, but all too true then, Harvard Law School refused to accept women until after my time and accordingly I applied to both Yale and Columbia law schools," she wrote.

But she managed to win the admiration of male peers.

The late Edward B. Hanify, a colleague at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray, wrote in a tribute in Landletter: "She was a pioneer woman lawyer in a masculine environment who gave no sign of defensive diffidence. She always had an inherent personal dignity, a quiet patient, firmness, a disposition to assure a fair, considerate hearing of different viewpoints . . ."

Judge Sullivan sat on the Land Court from 1973 to 1993, first as associate and then as chief justice.

Retired Land Court Judge William I. Randall of Framingham, who preceded Judge Sullivan as chief justice, said "she was decisive and meticulous in her opinions."

She had an "extraordinary knowledge of real estate law, more so than any judge or lawyer I knew," said retired Judge John E. Fenton Jr. of Andover, who succeeded her. "She had a unique gift of taking very complicated legal problems and writing decisions that were very lucid and that members of the bar could easily understand."

She faced the formidable challenge of overcoming ingrained prejudice in Boston, said Andre Vagliano of Landlaw Publishers in Brookline, which publishes land court decisions and Landletter.

"Marilyn Sullivan was a jurist who was skeptical about people in power, and that came from her own personal history as a Catholic woman in a Protestant Bostonian legal establishment. When she started her career, women were invisible in the large law firms of Boston," Vagliano said.

"After Judge Sullivan was appointed to the Land Court in 1973," he said, "its jurisdiction was dramatically expanded to include zoning and development disputes, and this is where she made her career. She was a brilliant arbitrator between the forces of developer greed and municipal obfuscation."

Judge Sullivan was born in Portsmouth, N.H., one of two daughters of John D. and Mary (McWilliams) Sullivan. Her father was a practicing lawyer there for many years before moving the family to the Wollaston section of Quincy in 1932.

After graduating from Quincy North High School in 1941, Judge Sullivan went to Radcliffe College, majored in government, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 1944. After graduation, she entered the WAVES, a World War II-era women's division of the Navy, and was posted to Washington, D.C., where she was assigned to communications for two years.

In her spare time, she sat in on sessions of Congress. Those visits, she wrote, gave her the chance to indulge her lifelong interest in politics. They also steered her toward a career in law.

After her service in the Navy, she went to Columbia Law School under the GI Bill of Rights. She graduated in 1949 and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar that year.

"When Marilyn took the Massachusetts Bar exam, she did so well on the written part she did not have to take the oral part," her sister said.

Her first legal position was as clerk to Justice Henry Lummus of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In 1951, she joined Ropes & Gray, where she did some real estate work and "a little bit of everything," she wrote. She remained at the firm for 22 years, until Governor Francis Sargent appointed her justice of the Land Court.

Judge Sullivan had never met Sargent before he swore her in, she wrote in Landletter. When his office asked her to call him, she did so from a pay phone at Boston City Hall, "worrying whether my nickel would run out before the call was completed. I thought my conversation would be with an aide and was stunned to hear a well-known voice . . . My heart nearly stopped."

Judge Sullivan's volume of work in the Land Court awed many. When Land Court cases came before her on appeal, said Elizabeth Dolan, retired Superior Court judge, "Marilyn's name was constantly coming up. She was a very hard worker and produced a tremendous amount of cases."

After Judge Sullivan retired in 1993, she worked as an adjunct professor of law at Suffolk Law School and New England School of Law.

Outside the courtroom, she was an avid reader of mystery books, a Red Sox fan, and a traveler.

"Marilyn was a superb teacher," said Ruth O'Brien of Brookline, a friend since they were both lawyers at Ropes & Gray, recalling how she gently mentored younger lawyers.

"It was very important to Marilyn that things were done right, and that people maintained high standards in the world," she said.

Her sister is Judge Sullivan's only immediate survivor.

A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. today in Sacred Heart Church in North Quincy. Burial will be in Calvary Cemetery in Portsmouth, N.H.