IT’S AUGUST, which means law students across the country are getting ready to return to classrooms and lecture halls for a new academic year. For most of these students, the bulk of their legal education will focus on the federal judicial system—reading cases from the US Supreme Court, and attempting to make sense of how law is made and interpreted at the national level.

But for most people, when we interact with the legal system, chances are that interaction will occur in our state—not federal—courts, where more than 95 percent of all cases are filed. These courts rarely receive the attention that the US Supreme Court gets, but the decisions they hand down are often of far greater significance to everyday people. Due to this lack of public scrutiny of state benches, it may come as a surprise to many that the majority of our local arbiters of justice come from backgrounds that are overwhelmingly focused on defending corporate and carceral interests. 

We deserve better. One way we can ensure that our interests are represented is by demanding professional diversity on the bench.

A new report from the People’s Parity Project finds that of sitting judges in Massachusetts, nearly half (48 percent) are former corporate lawyers, meaning they devoted meaningful portions of their career to protecting the bottom lines of corporate America. This includes all seven sitting justices on the Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in Massachusetts. Two of these justices were appointed by Gov. Maura Healey, and five were appointed by former Gov. Charlie Baker—indicating that this commitment to elevating pro-corporate lawyers to the bench is a bipartisan problem. 

The report also finds that fully 60 percent of sitting judges worked as prosecutors prior to assuming the bench. By contrast, only 3 percent worked as public defenders. Research from Emory University law professor Joanna Shepherd, among others, shows that state court judges with backgrounds as corporate lawyers and prosecutors are more likely to side with powerful interests and against individual people in need of justice. The fact that lawyers with these backgrounds are so overrepresented in Massachusetts courts should set off alarm bells for anybody who believes in the promise of equal justice in the Commonwealth. 

Unfortunately, Massachusetts is not an outlier in this lack of professional diversity on the bench. In 2023, the Brennan Center for Justice released an update to its annual report of state supreme court diversity, and the statistics are disappointing. All told, 82 percent of state supreme court justices have private practice on their resumes.

When attorneys with “public interest” experience are tapped for a seat, they are usually former prosecutors. What this means for us is that consequential decisions that may profoundly affect our daily lives are typically decided by a panel of attorneys who have little to no experience working directly with the average resident of their state. Our state judiciary ought to reflect the diversity of the individuals and interests that are directly impacted by their decisions.

Right now, there is an impending vacancy on the Massachusetts Court of Appeals, where the chief justice has announced that he will be stepping down on September 1. Gov. Healey ran on the idea of building a grassroots campaign “to bring people together and move Massachusetts forward.” If she is committed to following through on that promise, she must select a nominee with the experience to understand the impacts of the law on real people. 

To date, Healey has appointed few lawyers who’ve worked as legal aid attorneys or public defenders. Instead, her nominees include corporate lawyers, her former colleagues in the executive branch, and a handful of people who’ve donated small amounts of money to her political campaigns. 

We have seen steps at the national level from the Biden administration in selecting nominees from outside of the traditional pool of corporate and carceral professional experiences. Prioritizing professional diversity at the state level will help to build the courts’ legitimacy and safeguard it from private interests that care little for our lives and livelihoods.

A professionally diverse court is also nimble. Depth and breadth of knowledge and experience allow our judges to better adapt to new legal terrain, especially important in the time of increasingly technically complex issues. 

I urge Gov. Healey to honor her campaign promises and embrace the ethos of her alma mater, and my current law school. “Lawyering in the public interest” was the North Star of her legal education, and it is my hope for the people of Massachusetts that her future nominees to the bench have spent their career animated by the same principle.

Heather Atherton is a student at Northeastern University School of Law and a leadership fellow with the People’s Parity Project, a movement of law students and attorneys organizing for a democratized legal system which empowers working people and opposes subordination in any form.