Boston Globe: Healey taps state solicitor, former adviser to fill first open seat on Supreme Judicial Court

By Matt Stout

Originally published in the Boston Globe

Governor Maura Healey on Friday nominated state solicitor Elizabeth N. Dewar to the Supreme Judicial Court, tapping a longtime adviser and the youngest SJC nominee in decades to fill her first opening on the state’s highest court.

Dewar, 43, has been among the state’s leading appellate attorneys since Healey, then attorney general, appointed her in 2016 as state solicitor, a role in which Dewar supervised legal appeals for the attorney general’s office and advised Healey for the majority of her two terms as attorney general.

Dewar, a registered Democrat, also briefly served as the state’s top prosecutor this year after Healey became governor.

Abortion rights advocates quickly hailed her selection, noting Dewar authored briefs arguing against one of the country’s most restrictive abortion bans, a 2021 law in Texas that banned abortion after about six weeks. A Harvard University and Yale Law School graduate, Dewar clerked at all three levels of the federal judiciary: in the district court and appeals court levels, and for now-retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who in a brief interview on Friday called her an “outstanding law clerk — and a very nice person.”

“If you were to pick a perfect prototype of an appellate lawyer, you would pick attorney Dewar,” said Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel to the Massachusetts Bar Association.

Dewar also is, in some respects, an unusual pick, legal experts said. She is the first person in more than 20 years to be nominated for a spot on the SJC bench without having already served as a lower-court judge, following former Justice Robert Cordy, who was nominated in 2000 by then-governor Paul Cellucci.

Governors often look to the Superior Court or state appeals court for SJC picks, where judges build a track record of opinions that makes them “easy to vet . . . and see what leanings they may have in their writings,” said Healy, of the Mass. Bar Association.

Dewar would also be the youngest person to join the SJC since 1972, when Herbert P. Wilkins joined the high court at age 42. Wilkins ultimately served nearly 27 years on the SJC bench before retiring in 1999 as its chief justice.

If approved by the Governor’s Council, Dewar could serve on the high bench until July 2050, when she would hit the court’s mandatory retirement age of 70.

Healey on Friday called Dewar a “consensus-builder,” and noted that much of her appellate work as state solicitor fell before the SJC. Healey appointed her to serve as acting attorney general for the two weeks after her inauguration as governor and before Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell was sworn into her current term.

“She is a true student of the institution, and I am confident that she is the right person to fill this seat in this pivotal moment for the court,” Healey said of Dewar.

Dewar was not available for an interview Friday, Healey aides said.

Dewar will fill the seat currently held by Justice Elspeth B. Cypher, an appointee of former governor Charlie Baker who plans to retire in January. Cypher was the second openly gay member ever appointed to the SJC, and currently is one of three women on the high bench.

Healey, a former civil rights attorney, underwent a prolonged search for her first nominee, extending the application window three times since Cypher announced her retirement in June.

The first-term Democrat will have another slot to fill on the SJC after Justice David A. Lowy said he, too, will retire early, with plans to step down in February to become general counsel for the University of Massachusetts system.

Legal observers have closely followed the process, looking for signs as to what direction, if any, Healey could push a high court that is the most diverse in its history and has been considered moderate, if relatively non-ideological.

Dewar brings a vision informed not just by Massachusetts law, but from around the country, having written or supervised on amicus briefs the attorney general’s office has filed in federal court and elsewhere, said former SJC Justice Margot Botsford, who also is Dewar’s neighbor in Jamaica Plain.

“She is willing to push the law forward,” said Botsford, now chair of the state’s Ethics Commission. “She is very young, I get it. But she’s got this really wonderful breadth of experience as an appellate lawyer.”

Dewar, who lives in Jamaica Plain with her husband and two daughters, previously worked at the firm Ropes & Gray LLP, and was a civil rights advocate at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, according to Healey’s office.

She clerked for Breyer more than a decade ago, the retired justice said in a phone call Friday. He declined to discuss Dewar at length, citing her pending confirmation before the Governor’s Council.

When she later joined Ropes & Gray, Dewar — who goes by “Bessie” — brought not just an impressive résumé but a “fair-minded approach” that, at times, brushed against the demands of being a trial lawyer, said Joan A. Lukey, who worked with Dewar at Ropes & Gray and is now a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.

“I had to say to her, ‘Bessie, now you’re an advocate. You’re not weighing the two sides and determining which has the most merit,’” Lukey said. “She’s a quick learner, she got it. But she didn’t love it. She always loved the scholarly side of it.”

Her role as state solicitor, Lukey said, was a stepping stone back toward “the pure academic review of the law and the facts” that the SJC does. “She’ll be so good at it,” she said.

Rebecca Hart Holder, president of Reproductive Equity Now, said in a statement that Dewar wrote briefs arguing against Texas’s law banning most abortions after six weeks and contributed to dozens of others surrounding abortion access.

“We know that Bessie will bring her brilliant legal mind to the Supreme Judicial Court to make profound impacts and create a lasting legacy for reproductive freedom in the Commonwealth,” she said.

Dewar’s nomination wasn’t Healey’s only one Friday. She also announced three nominations to the state’s probate and family court, tapping Manisha Bhatt, an attorney for Greater Boston Legal Services; Bernadette Stark, director of the Student Legal Services Office at UMass Amherst; and Michelle A. Yee, currently a senior program manager in the probate and family court’s administrative office.

The state budget Healey signed in August created eight new judicial slots in the probate and family court, the largest one-time expansion of a state judicial bench since at least 2000.