Protecting justice
Margaret H. Marshall is a woman of firsts: the first chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the oldest appellate court in the Western Hemisphere. She was also the first female litigator at Choate, Hall, & Stewart — a century-old Boston law firm — and the first female vice president and general counsel at Harvard, a post she held from 1992 to 1996. This week (Nov. 16), Marshall was not the first to deliver the Paul Tillich Lecture, a tradition since 1990 at the Memorial Church at Harvard. But she may have been the first to bring the ideas of Tillich — one of the 20th century’s most influential Protestant theologians — into the gritty, vital arena of America’s state courts. That arena is in trouble, Marshall said — underfunded and understaffed to such a degree that Americans are beginning to question the justice of the justice system itself. Other issues loom over...