The Sun on Maggie Marshall

I previously blogged on Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stepping down.  Here.

Now The Lowell Sun has come out with an editorial generally complimentary of the departing Ms Marshall.♠

Margaret H. Marshall has a great story to tell and we can't wait for her book, if she ever decides to write one.

The Editorial Writer does note that with the Goodridge decision the Marshall Court may have hurt the issue of gay marriage.

While Marshall takes credit for safeguarding the judicial branch's independence from political influence, her stridency has earned the SJC the label of an "activist court."  The best example is the landmark case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003) in which gay marriage was legalized through litigation rather than legislation in a controversial 4-3 ruling.  Seven years later, however, only four other states grant civil marriages to gays while 30 states have adopted constitutional measures against same-sex marriage.  Instead of generating a transcontinental wave of gay-marriage laws, as most supporters envisioned, Massachusetts' activist ruling had an opposite effect:  It produced a backlash across America as a majority of states moved to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

Still, Marshall and the SJC can lay claim to a trailblazing victory or sorts:  Forty states have expanded their civil-union laws to guarantee equal benefits for couples of all sexes.

There were a couple of other rulings that the Editorial Writer objected to, including Brasi Development Corp. v. Attorney General

Brasi Development Corp. v. Attorney General (2010): The SJC overturned a Middlesex Superior Court ruling -- and sided with Attorney General Martha Coakley -- saying a private developer's lease agreement to build a multimillion-dollar dormitory for UMass Lowell, via the Request for Proposal process, skirted the state's competitive public-bidding law. The SJC went to technical extremes to support the attorney general, who was acting at the behest of a pro-union group crying foul for losing out to a nonunion contractor. While noting that the state's public-construction law failed to adequately address parameters for construction leases, the SJC interpreted the inconsistencies as an end-around the existing law, siding with Coakley's reasoning to kill the nonunion developer's project.

UMass Lowell officials have since dropped plans for a new dormitory, terming any public-construction option as cost-prohibitive to students and taxpayers.

I am not sure this is so much a hit on the Supreme Judicial Court as it is on Attorney General Martha Coakley.  She could not leave well enough alone.  Now we have nothing.  The SJC just wandered down the path to to much bureaucracy and not enough common sense.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Remember, articles in The Sun go away after a while, to a different place.  I will not be updating their links unless I am bedridden and have read every book in the house.