Jurist's career of firsts hits a milestone

Lynch being sworn in as head of appeals court

She was the first female law clerk to a well-known federal judge in Rhode Island, a feat so unusual in 1971 that the Boston Evening Globe put the appointment of the young "slender woman" with "big hazel eyes" on its front page.

She was also the first female head of the litigation department at the Boston law firm Foley, Hoag & Eliot, and the first (and still only) female judge to sit on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Sandra L. Lynch will achieve another career distinction today when she is sworn in as the first female chief judge of the Boston-based appeals court. (Women head two of the 11 other circuit courts in the federal system.)

"Just as it is good to have women judges, it is good to have some women chief judges," Lynch, a 61-year-old appointee of the Clinton administration, said with a grin Tuesday in her office at the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse.

As a new judge on the appeals court, Lynch had almost an immediate impact. A stinging dissent she wrote in 1996 prompted Congress to hastily rewrite a federal statute to recognize rape as a crime that inher ently causes serious bodily injury.

Now, as the successor to Michael Boudin - who is completing his seven-year term as chief judge and will stay on the bench - Lynch said she hopes to put her own stamp on the job, which adds administrative duties to her bench responsibilities.

Among her biggest challenges, she said, is encouraging Congress and a not-always-sympathetic public to raise the pay of federal judges, which has not changed significantly in two decades.

Lynch said several appellate and trial court judges in the First Circuit, which comprises Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico, are considering leaving because pay has lagged behind skyrocketing expenses such as college tuition for their children.

Appeals court judges, including the chief judge, make $179,500 a year, district court judges $169,300 a year.

While those wages would thrill most people, many judges could make far more as attorneys. The starting pay for associates at some Boston law firms is $160,000 a year, according to a 2008 survey by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. And seasoned partners can earn several times that.

"I think, inherently, that people have a sense of fairness," Lynch said, seated before a window with a spectacular view of Boston Harbor. "To say to someone, 'You need to live at the same salary that existed 20 years ago, and we know that inflation has eroded the worth of that salary,' I think most people would think it's unfair."

A 29 percent salary increase cleared both the US House and Senate judiciary committees in recent months, but its prospects are uncertain.

Lynch said the court's other challenges include a growing caseload despite a vacancy among the six judgeships. The court usually sits in panels of three; senior judges with reduced caseloads help fill the vacancy.

By federal statute, the job of chief judge goes to the most senior judge who is under the age of 65 and has served at least a year in the circuit.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law who specializes in the federal courts, said the job of chief judge is "really pretty thankless." The chief judge makes sure the appeals panels run smoothly, disciplines judges, and develops policies.

"You certainly are the face of the court, which is critical," he said. "Everybody in New England will be looking to that person as a leader."

The current chief judge, Boudin, was appointed to the appeals court by the first President Bush after working in President Reagan's Justice Department. Boudin had a reputation as a conservative lawyer. But as a jurist he has written opinions that have pleased (and displeased) partisans on both ends of the political aisle on matters ranging from sentencing of drug traffickers to affirmative action.

Lynch came to the bench with a more liberal, activist reputation that dated to her days at Boston University Law School. She was an outspoken supporter of liberal causes when student unrest shut down much of the university but she still managed to edit law review articles, a former assistant dean of the law school told the Globe in 1994.

Anita L. Johnson, an assistant US attorney in Massachusetts and member of the law school's class of 1971 with Lynch, said recently that Lynch was "always the star of the class."

"She understood legal issues immediately," Johnson said, adding that Lynch displays the same penetrating intelligence on the court.

After law school, Lynch clerked for US District Judge Raymond J. Pettine and worked as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts. She soon got involved in the Boston school desegregation case, eventually becoming general counsel to the state Department of Education and representing a plaintiff in the desegregation suit.

In 1978, she joined Foley, Hoag & Eliot and helped represent the chemical giant W.R. Grace in the Woburn groundwater contamination lawsuit that inspired the book "A Civil Action."

Michael B. Keating, who now heads the firm's litigation department and worked with Lynch, described her as a tenacious trial lawyer who drove herself hard. Yet she always remembered colleagues' birthdays and sent him flowers when he became president of the Boston Bar Association, which she previously had headed.

Since she joined the appeals court in 1995 to fill the vacancy created by Stephen Breyer's elevation to the Supreme Court, Lynch has garnered attention for her written opinions. From 1998 through 2000, she was the third-most cited federal judge in the nation, excluding Supreme Court justices, as measured by the number of references to her opinions by judges in other circuits, according to an analysis by the Southern California Law Review.

Some lawyers say that Lynch can be prickly on the bench and are concerned that she might be less accommodating than Boudin, when it comes to setting deadlines for briefs and scheduling arguments. But others describe Lynch as demanding but fair.

Few of Lynch's actions drew more attention than her 1996 dissent in a federal carjacking case.

Following federal guidelines, a trial judge had added 10 years to a 15-year term to the sentence of Reynaldo Vazquez-Rivera in Puerto Rico because the crime involved bodily injury: the defendant raped his victim at gunpoint after the carjacking. But an all-male appeals panel overturned the sentence, concluding that rape did not constitute serious bodily injury. When the full appeals court refused to rehear the matter, Lynch issued a blistering dissent.

To characterize the abduction and rape as anything other than serious bodily injury is "directly contrary to the intent of the statute," Lynch wrote. "Congress would be appalled at this outcome."

A few months later, Senator Edward M. Kennedy wrote Lynch to say Congress had passed a bill to clarify the statute and that she deserved all the credit.

"I don't think even Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes himself ever had a dissent become law this quickly," Kennedy wrote.

Lynch, who lives in the North End, is married to an attorney, and has a grown son, said she is going to have to reduce the number of cases she sits on because of her new administrative duties. She expressed mixed feelings.

"I do enjoy grappling with hard cases and writing opinions," she said. "But when you are asked to be chief judge, there's a certain sense of obligation to take on those tasks and to try to do the job well."

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com