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IN MEMORIAM: JUSTICE MARTHA B.

SOSMAN

The editors respectfully dedicate this issue of the New England Law
Review to Justice Martha B. Sosman (October 20, 1950 March 10, 2007)

ROBERT J. CORDY*

For six years and a thousand cases, I had the good fortune to have
Martha Sosman as my colleague on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Courtto be inspired by her and to bear witness to the extraordinary
service she rendered to the law and the people of the Commonwealth.
But our friendship began nearly twenty years earlier, when we were
both assistant United States attorneys for the District of Massachusetts.
When former United States Attorney William F. Weld became Governor
Weld in January of 1991, I had the privilege of serving as his Legal
Counsel, responsible for, among other things, assisting in the recruitment of
qualified women to the Massachusetts judiciary. Martha Sosman was on
the Governor's short list of prime candidates. It took a few years before she
felt comfortable leaving the first all-women law firm that she helped found
in 1989, but by 1993 the Massachusetts Superior Court had added an
exceptional young trial judge to its bench. Seven years later Martha
Sosman was sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court.
A friend and former colleague of Martha Sosman's in the U.S.
Attorneys Office once described her as a rare light in our lives. To
others she was a treasure, elegant, accomplished, intense,
private and extraordinarily kind. I can attest that she was all those
things and more.
It is one thing to work with someone like Martha Sosman as a
colleague in the practice of law, to have observed her occasionally in the
performance of her judicial duties, or to have shared personal and
professional experiences with her over many years. It is quite another to
share the bench with her during oral argument, to sit directly across from
her in the consultation room of the court to discuss and decide the cases

* Associate Justice, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

387
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388 NEW ENGLAND LAW REVIEW [Vol. 42:387

together, and to be regularly exposed to her incisive thinking and elegant

prose.
She brought an unparalleled intellect and a passion for the
complexities of law and life to her work as a judge. Yet, as important as the
power and breadth of that intellect was to the work of the court, its greatest
value lay in its honesty, unencumbered by self-interest, bias, or personal
agenda. Her clarity of thought could be as frightening to practitioners as it
was exhilarating to her colleagues. I was never so relieved as when she
posed the question I harbored but lacked the self confidence to ask. She
was fearless before the law, never cowed by timeworn assumptions, never
deterred from challenging the premises of precedent gone astray. Her quest
was always to cut through to the central issue in the case (occasionally not
what the lawyers wanted it to be), to place the issue in its proper context,
and to resolve it as coherently as the law would allow. To this task she did
not bring preconceived notions of what the outcomes should be, nor did she
leave common sense at the door. She followed where the law led. Her voice
was always one of reason and utmost respect for both the power and the
limits of judicial authority.
In accord with tradition, I spoke right after Justice Sosman in our
regular full court meetings where pending cases and draft opinions were
scrutinized. Consequently I almost always had the benefit of her thinking
before being required to express my own. Needless to say her thoughts
were always insightful, clear, fully formed and as we say, spot on. It
made my life as the court's most junior justice a great deal less stressful.
Although I rarely could bring myself to fully commit one way or another
on an issue of importance until I heard her speak on the matter, we didn't
always agree. While she was always collegial and practical in the face of
disagreement, she was as tough-minded, direct and principled a person as I
have ever met.
In a limited respect, her work on the court consists of the 130 or so
opinions that she authored during her too brief tenure here. But that work,
as important as it was and as lasting as it will be, only begins to reflect her
role as a shaping force in our jurisprudence.
Justice Sosman's writing was as lucid and compelling as her
thinking. She took great pride in it, and worked relentlessly at getting it just
right and making it seem effortless. But her skills in this regard were not
reserved for her own promotion. Her efforts were always directed at
improving the work of the court. She was a tireless contributor to its
opinions. Her thoughts, most often in purple ink, adorned the margins of
our drafts as she helped add clarity and precision to every opinion authored
by every judge on the court. In this, as in many other ways, her selflessness
was apparent and, indeed, contagious.
Sosman dissents were truly something to behold. There are few
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2008] IN MEMORIAM: JUSTICE MARTHA B. SOSMAN 389

things more daunting than writing an opinion of the court into the teeth of
an expected Sosman dissent. When she felt strongly about a matter, and
was not able to persuade her colleagues during our discussions, she would
put her thoughts to paper, working relentlessly to expose what she
perceived to be the flaws in the court's reasoning. No matter how much
time she spent in this endeavor, her goal was never a petty or a personal
one, it was always to help the court get the right answer. Her best dissents
never left the consultation room. They became the word of the court. And
of those triumphs I know she was most proud. But such was the power of
both her intellect and her writing. And that exquisite combination was her
greatest legacy.