Massachusetts Supreme Court Associate Justice Barbara A. Link, the first openly LGBTQ person to serve on the Court, died last month at 75.
“The experience of being a member of a minority group, not only when I came out, but also when I became part of a two-mom, multi-racial, Jewish family [provided perspective] to see things that before had simply escaped my notice, and I came to appreciate in entirely new ways the awesome power of words, and of law, to shape and convey reality,” Link said back in 2011. And by all accounts, that is exactly what she did.
Reports the Boston Globe:
A granddaughter of working-class Polish immigrants, Barbara A. Lenk began and ended her years as a state Supreme Judicial Court associate justice by invoking a key lesson from the French order of nuns who taught at her all-girls high school in New York City.
The nuns insisted “that we were duty bound” to leave the world a better place, Justice Lenk recalled in her 2011 swearing-in ceremony, when she became the court’s first openly gay jurist. She revisited that sentiment in a retirement gathering, 9½ years later.
In 2011, she also drew inspiration from Benjamin Kaplan, a late, much-admired former SJC associate justice who reminded law clerks that everyone at the court was there “to make a difference.”
“I, too, am a judge because I want to make a difference,” she said. “As a judge, my only allegiance is to the rule of law and to the fair and equal treatment of all who come before the court. Judges have no constituencies other than those who seek justice and there can be no thumbs on the scale.”
Justice Lenk, admired throughout her nearly three decades as a Massachusetts jurist for her intellect, humbleness, and the elegance of her written opinions, died May 19. She was 75 and lived in Carlisle.
