Millicent Lawton

The special town meeting in Foxborough on December 6 was a civic gathering unlike any other in the town’s history. A tent and heaters were set up outside Foxborough High School to accommodate the overflow as a record crowd of 2,334 residents–out of a possible 10,000 voters–turned out to decide whether the New England Patriots […]

Last year’s endless budget impasse demonstrated that it can be just as tough to decide how to spend an abundance of state revenue as it is to parcel out budget cuts. But a Brookline entrepreneur and a Boston University law professor say the four-month logjam might have been avoided if Gov. Paul Cellucci, Senate President […]

It was Tom Campbell’s dream to be a prosecutor. He lived that dream for six years, joining the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office straight out of Northeastern Law School in 1993. But last November, Campbell quit to join a private law firm in Boston. Why? “I left,” he says, “because I couldn’t support my family.” […]

At an event like the annual winter meeting of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, discussions of school safety or finance issues are as commonplace as the coffee-and-danish breakfast. But one mid-morning session carried a title more typical of gatherings at a hospital or community center. Echoing the same mix of anger, fear, resignation, and […]

Ah, the Registry. It’s the state agency everyone loves to hate. But Massachusetts drivers may just have to start looking for a new public-sector scapegoat. That is, if the new Registrar of Motor Vehicles, on the job since September, can do the governmental equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Daniel A. Grabauskas, […]

BRAINTREE—It’s easy to get lost in the details of the 17-month political melodrama that rocked town hall here. There was, for instance, the town administrator secretly getting paid more than town meeting authorized; the misuse of town money, cars, and cellular phones; the threats and intimidation of municipal employees and residents by town officials; a […]

In most ways, it looked like just another day at the new federal courthouse in downtown Boston. On a recent afternoon in one of the cavernous building’s wood-paneled courtrooms, Judge Joseph L. Tauro called the proceedings in a civil case to order, addressing each of the smartly dressed lawyers as “Mr.” or “Ms.” The attorneys […]