Gov. Deval Patrick this afternoon tapped Appeals Court Judge Geraldine S. Hines for the Supreme Judicial Court — a nomination that would make her the first black woman to serve on the state’s highest court.
“If I were the governor of the Commonwealth, I would have picked her for this position,” said Bob Jubinville of the Governor’s Council, which will vote on the nomination.
Jubinville, an attorney who said he appeared before Hines many times during her dozen years as a Superior Court judge, called her a “class act” with “wonderful judicial temperament.”
Hines began her judicial career in 2001 as an associate justice of the Superior Court, and was appointed to the Appeals Court by Patrick last year.
Hines would fill the open slot left by the retirement in July of Chief Justice Roderick Ireland, the first black person to serve on the court. Associate Justice Ralph Gants will succeed Ireland as chief justice.
A native of Mississippi, Hines graduated from Tougaloo College in 1968 and the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1971, according to her official biography. She went on to became a staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, focusing on prisoner’s rights litigation, and then, from 1973 to 1977 practiced criminal law with the Roxbury Defenders’ Committee.
She litigated civil rights cases relating to discrimination in education and advised on special education law while a staff attorney at the Harvard University Center for Law and Education, and gained prominence as a lawyer in the case of Commonwealth v. Willie Sanders, a highly publicized trial of a black man accused of raping eight women, her biography notes. In private practice, she continued to litigate civil rights cases, including employment discrimination and police misconduct claims, as a founding partner in the first law firm of women of color in the New England region.
Her biography notes she is an active member of organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild and the National Conference of Black Lawyers. She has also been an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern University Law School since 1980.
A spokeswoman for the trial court referred comment to the governor’s office, which declined to comment before this afternoon’s formal press announcement.
