Deval Patrick has reached the season of finalities.
This week, he watched as lawmakers overrode what are likely the final vetoes he’ll ever have the pleasure of issuing. He has only so many press conferences left, a limited number of Monday leadership meetings to go, just a few bill signings remaining.
It is legacy time for the governor, that time in a governorship when aides count up, concoct, and repackage the accomplishments of the last — in his case — eight years as truly groundbreaking and stash away the shortcomings in the state archives like embarrassing family photos.
Patrick will tout, with varying degrees of credibility, achievements in education, health care, life sciences, the economy, renewable energy, infrastructure, and the response to the Marathon bombings. He will probably not dwell much on the Department of Children and Families, the drug lab scandal, or his imperiled casino law.
Perhaps more durable than either the centerpieces or blemishes on his résumé is the imprimatur that Patrick has left on the state’s judicial system. Not since renegade drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan was handling evidence has someone left this many fingerprints lying around.
This week, he swore in Ralph Gants as the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Patrick’s second appointment to the highest seat on the highest court. On Thursday, after deadline, Geraldine Hines was expected to take her place as the court’s first black woman, tilting the court to majority female for the first time. The governor has tapped the first black chief justice, Roderick Ireland, who retired last week; the first Asian-American justice, Fernande Duffly; and the first openly gay justice, Barbara Lenk.
Patrick, who will have appointed five of the seven justices once Hines is in, has had a similar impact on the rest of the state’s court system.
Of its 411 judicial positions, Patrick has, with five months to go in his term, filled 164, according to his office, good for 40 percent. Seventy-six of them have been female, and 31 minorities.
Mary Lu Bilek, dean of the UMass Law School, which she credits Patrick with helping to create, said that diversity on the bench can lead to more nuanced legal opinions.
“Where you come from influences how you understand the facts, and so the same legal standard ends up with a different perspective and a different result depending on where you come from,” she said.
Some in the courthouse crowd take exception to Patrick’s appointments to the state’s highest court because, the argument goes, they are not typical workaday judges who have logged time in the state’s lower courts. He has instead looked to superior and appeals court judges to fill his openings. In courts where the case volume is higher — like the district, juvenile, and probate — dispensers of justice deal more directly with real life and less with the sometimes gauzy, suppositional world of the upper courts.
But, quality or judgments about judges aside, the bench will serve as an undeniable centerpiece of Patrick’s legacy, and one that he can point to should he, one day, decide to make another run at electoral politics.
Stacked against his immediate predecessors, the sheer quantity of Patrick’s appointments, a variable over which a governor has little control, sets him apart. (Also setting Patrick apart is his length of service; he’s set to become the first governor since Michael Dukakis to complete two terms.)
“He won the judicial lottery, by having more judicial picks available to him than any governor since Dukakis,” said former GOP state representative and Romney aide Daniel B. Winslow, himself a former judge. “He’s been very lucky in having an opportunity to shape the bench, and leave a legacy within the judicial branch that will far outlast his executive branch legacy.”
Former Republican governor Bill Weld, who appointed Winslow, said that, dating back to when Dukakis was governor, the judicial appointment process had become “almost routinized and excellence has been the touchstone.”
“And it’s not like that in other states,” Weld said. “In states where they elect judges and even in some states where the governor appoints judges, you’ve got to make a political contribution to get a judgeship, and that’s no way to run a railroad when you’ve got lifetime appointments.”
“If you lined the Dukakis, Cellucci, Weld, and Patrick nominees for superior court and appellate court up against each other, you really couldn’t tell a difference” in quality, Weld said.
Patrick’s immediate predecessor, Mitt Romney, tapped 65 judges, banking to the ideological left early in his term and then to the right toward its end. Romney, too, won plaudits for the diversity of his appointees. For obvious reasons, his ties to Massachusetts’ particular brand of jurisprudence was not something Romney emphasized while running for president.
Jim O’Sullivan can be reached at Jim.OSullivan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JOSreports.