Award-Winning Work
BC Law Magazine’s Winter 2025 feature “When Justice Meets the Machine” received an award for spread design from the Society of Publication Designers, one of the industry’s leading organizations honoring excellence in editorial design. Kudos to Creative Director Robert Parsons for the design and illustrator La Boca for the accompanying illustration.
The Treachery of Superlatives
In January, when Hon. David Mills ’67 learned of the passing of Francis J. Larkin, associate dean of BC Law when Mills entered law school, Mills sent a beautiful remembrance of him to BC Law Magazine. (Read Mills’ full letter at bclawimpact.org/).
To this day, I believe I could not have found finer professors or a better place to begin learning to love the rule of law. Frank Larkin wrote hundreds, if not thousands of letters to law firms, judges, and potential employers on behalf of BC Law graduates. Each letter was tailored to the student it concerned, and each contained Frank’s signature phrase: “fully mindful of the treachery of superlatives.” I cannot say that Frank and I had an immediate friendship, yet he seemed to know all students’ backgrounds, interests, hopes, and intentions.
My memory of Frank, however, carries a deeply personal weight. In April 1967, my life collapsed under the force of a catastrophic loneliness crisis surrounding my sexuality. I was placed in a locked ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital while my classmates moved on to the bar review (and exam), to their families, clerkships, jobs, hopes, and dreams. I was completely undone—broken in ways no one, including Frank Larkin, could have known.
By the following year, and with the support of the school and many classmates, I had reassembled enough of myself to sit for the bar exam and try to rejoin the path my classmates had taken. Around that time, Hugh H. Bownes of the United States District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, reached out to law schools seeking a clerk with writing skills. I never saw the letter Frank sent to him, but I know what it contained: that familiar phrase, “fully mindful of the treachery of superlatives.”
Frank’s influence did not end there. As my clerkship concluded, Frank “placed” me in the office of Middlesex District Attorney John J. Droney. That led to lifelong friendships with John and his wife Mary, with former Governor Foster Furcolo, and with Ruth Abrams—then John Irwin’s chief of appeals in Robert Quinn’s criminal division. Those relationships became cherished threads in the fabric of my life. And there was more. When Abrams became the first Executive Secretary of the Superior Court, Frank “placed” me in her former position.
I went on to serve as an assistant to Frank Bellotti, then entered a 20-year law partnership with Frank Teague and Ed Patten. From that came Governor Swift’s nomination of me as the first—and still the only—openly gay appellate judge in Massachusetts. That chapter concluded with my mandatory retirement at age 70. I then spent five years on the State Ethics Commission by appointment of Governor Patrick, and I now serve on the Judicial Nominating Commission by appointment of Governor Healey.
I remain mindful that I was never worthy of Frank’s superlatives and his indefatigable support. But from the deepest part of myself, and until the moment of my passing, I will never cease to thank Frank Larkin for helping lift me from a locked psychiatric ward into a life and career filled with challenge, opportunity, and joy.