THE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT said on Monday that it would not get involved in setting pay rates for private attorneys representing indigent clients – known as bar advocates –ruling that responsibility for their pay rests squarely with the Legislature, which is charged by the Massachusetts Constitution with directing all state spending.

“We begin with the obvious,” Chief Justice Kimberly Budd wrote in the unanimous 25-page opinion: “Judicially ordered rates for bar advocates raise separation of powers concerns.”

The Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender organization that also oversees the private bar advocates who represent most indigent defendants, had asked the high court to “exercise the judiciary’s inherent power” and allow state courts to order bar advocate pay higher than what the Legislature has set.

Justices expressed unease with that request during oral arguments in November, and formally rejected the proposition in their ruling on Monday.

The ruling came on the same day that a legislative committee heard testimony on a ballot question that would allow staff public defenders at CPCS, who unlike the private bar advocates are state employees, to form a union if they wish.

Bar advocates stopped accepting new assignments in Middlesex and Suffolk counties in May 2025 to protest hourly wages of $65, less than in every other New England state. At the height of the crisis, nearly 800 defendants were without legal representation at one time, and thousands were impacted over the course of the year.

The issue became so acute that the SJC allowed the Lavallee protocol to take effect. That is a system the court previously established in which defendants without legal representation for a window of time can be released from detention or have their cases dropped.

When it comes to the question of adjusting their pay to reflect current need, however, Budd wrote that such matters are up to the Legislature.

“As with all funding decisions, determining the appropriate compensation rates for bar advocates is a matter of policy requiring the consideration of diverse factors, such as overhead costs, living expenses, market rates for comparable work, and incentive structure,” Budd wrote. “The Legislature is in a better position than the judiciary to gather and evaluate the information relevant to such determinations.”

Meanwhile, labor leaders and staff attorneys who want CPCS staff to gain the ability to unionize brought their case to a Beacon Hill hearing on Monday morning.

They have pushed unsuccessfully for years to gain that power through an act of the Legislature, but are now advancing a ballot question that would explicitly add CPCS employees to the section of state law allowing public workers to bargain collectively, similar to provisions already in place for agencies such as the Department of Transportation and the state Lottery.

Two CPCS attorneys, backed by the labor muscle of SEIU Local 88, pitched a legislative committee on their desire for collective bargaining power. They described the job of representing indigent defendants as rewarding, but also harrowing and taxing, and said higher-ups at the agency have not provided necessary support.

“There’s no voice in our upper management that’s responsive to our constant, constant reminders that our clients are suffering, that our staff is overwhelmed, and that many of us are facing abuse in the courtroom,” Tanvi Verma, a trial attorney in CPCS’s Boston public defender division, told a legislative panel tasked with reviewing the field of ballot questions.

Employees of the public defender organization have tried to unionize on at least three separate occasions since 1979, but in each instance, state labor officials found they did not possess collective bargaining rights under state law.

Supporters have also tried to get the Legislature to make a change to no avail. On multiple occasions, bills that would extend unionization rights to CPCS workers advanced through legislative committees but died without a House or Senate vote.

Rep. Mike Day, a Stoneham Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, told reporters Monday that lawmakers previously heard qualms about whether public defenders could balance their union roles with the “ethical obligation” of representing defendants. Other questions remain, he added, about how to divide the agency’s attorneys, supervisors, and support staff into bargaining units.

“It’s a relatively straightforward ballot question when you read it, but that’s where the devil [is],” he said. “When you get under the hood on these things and what the actual ramifications are, that’s where we have some issues.”

No one spoke at Monday’s hearing in opposition to the ballot question. Anthony Benedetti, CPCS’s chief counsel, told lawmakers the agency would neither support nor oppose the unionization campaign.

While the ballot fight unfolds, CPCS continues a significant expansion of its staff ordered by Beacon Hill.

The Legislature responded to last year’s bar advocate action by increasing District Court rates for private lawyers to $75 an hour, which will be followed by another bump to $85 in August 2026. Policymakers also appropriated $40 million for the CPCS to hire 320 additional public defenders over two years.

That action has become a point in the nascent political fight over the right to unionize. Verma, the public defender in the Boston division, said Monday that her office jumped from “having enough attorneys to count on two hands to what is projected to be upwards of 40 attorneys by the end of this year.”

She argued that the newcomers need more support than CPCS leadership is currently able to provide, and that a staff union could help plug existing gaps.

“Most of these attorneys are, like I was, fresh out of law school, excited to do this work, deeply dedicated to their clients, and they are not being adequately supported. They are not being set up for success,” she said.

Lawmakers have shown no interest in paying bar advocates more than the rates worked out in the August legislation. They sent a measure seeking another raise to study, effectively killing it.

By late February, only eight unrepresented indigent defendants remained in the affected courts, Budd wrote in Monday’s opinion.

Because the Legislature had raised pay rates, authorized a significant expansion of public defenders, and the existing Lavallee protocol was “functioning as designed to protect the liberty interests of indigent criminal defendants affected by the work stoppage,” Budd wrote, there was no basis for judicial intervention on pay rates based on the idea that the state did not have “a constitutionally adequate court system.”

The court acknowledged that judges hold inherent powers to intervene in legislative spending decisions to protect the court system, but said doing so requires extraordinary circumstances and exhaustion of all other remedies. Neither condition was met here, Budd wrote.