Q&A with Mary Mullarkey | First female, longest-serving Supreme Court chief justice

Colorado Politics: I understand you implemented a rule that all court facilities should have waiting areas for children while their parents appeared in court. Looking at that policy decision in the year 2021 it seems completely logical, but did you get any resistance to the idea at the time?

Mary Mullarkey: I don’t think there was a particular resistance. It was a question of how it would be implemented. When a new courthouse was built or a courthouse was significantly remodeled, then it would be relatively easy to incorporate child care facilities. The difficulty would arise when it was an older courthouse and substantial modifications would have to be made.

For example, there were new courthouses being planned in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. In those cases, it was relatively easy to plan for child care facilities.

CP: I was looking through your 2005 State of the Judiciary address to the legislature and I noticed you told lawmakers that given the population growth in Colorado in the state's 22 judicial districts, “It is time to see if the boundaries of the judicial districts should be changed." Sixteen years later we still have those same 22 judicial districts, although we're finally getting a 23rd in a couple of years. This being a post-census year where we are adjusting all the legislative districts, do you think we still need to do the same for judicial districts?

Mullarkey: What happened when I proposed changing it is the DAs [District Attorneys] said, “We don’t want that.” I don’t know what they would think now.

CP: Speaking of things that have changed over time, you are the first woman to be chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court. What changed the most for women in the legal profession between your time at Harvard in the 1960s and by the time you retired in 2010?

Mullarkey: It’s more like, “What didn’t change,” almost. The numbers are different. But there are not as many women occupying positions of power in law firms as you would think there would be.

When I went to law school, you had to be really competitive to get through that whole thing. There were no women teaching law at Harvard Law School and now there are a lot of women who are law professors.

When I was there, there were no law professors who were women and there was no need to be welcoming to women or anything like that. So there has definitely been an effort to make it a welcoming, warm environment for law students.

CP: You were the longest serving chief justice — 12 years — and as you know, the Colorado Supreme Court has adopted a rotational term for the chief justice of approximately two to three years. So it's not likely we will soon see another chief justice serve as long as you did. Do you think there are more benefits of having a long-serving chief justice or having the responsibility shift to all of the justices over time?

Mullarkey: I think the change to two or three years is not a good idea. There are changes that sometimes take a very long time to get done. One of my big achievements was to get the new court building [Carr Center], and it took 10 years for me to get that done. And I think that in terms of getting it funded and done, getting it paid for — from what I remember of the old building, there were really a lot of problems with the building. I wrote to the legislators and invited them to come around so I could show them all the problems we were having with the building. It's funny because they were nodding their heads and saying, “Oh, yes, we agree.” And they said, “How are you going to pay for that?”

And it's like: it's the legislature's job to come up with the money and a way to do that!

That sort of issue — how to build a coalition to get the building constructed — that is not something that you could do in two years.

I think the reason for doing it is there are a lot of people on the Court right now who want to be the chief justice, and that's probably a reason for this two or three year rotation. I also was pretty active in the national association for chief justices [Conference of Chief Justices] and there were a lot of states that did this two, three year rotation. I didn't think that it worked out very well and in the states where it was a short term, a lack of ability to implement ideas.

Talking about the children's waiting room and those sorts of issues, those were all things that came up through chief justices who were long-term chiefs. That was in places like California and New York — the kind of chiefs who could come up with those kinds of changes and develop the ideas of how could you improve the functioning of the courts. These short two-year terms, very rarely they'd come up with ideas that could implement and develop the ideas because they're just learning how to do things. 

CP: As the chief justice, you are an administrator and policy-setter in addition to being a vote in cases. What sticks with you more: your accomplishments as the judicial branch's leader, like spearheading the building of the Carr Center, or the cases that you participated in that shaped the legal terrain in Colorado?

Mullarkey: The administrative things are more important. It was a chance to build that building…[but] both are important. It's hard to say.

I think of some of the cases that were really important, such as the Taylor Ranch case, it was a big case that was in the San Luis Valley involving the question of whether people who purchased land had the right to access the [ranch], as the amount of acreage was something like 90,000 acres. The rights had been there since Colorado was part of Mexico, and became part of the United States after the Mexican War.

The question was whether the people who had purchased those lands were entitled to have access to the [ranch]. And so that was a big case that had been in our courts since 1960 and I wrote, I think, it was two opinions. We decided that they were entitled to access that land for purposes of collecting firewood and grazing animals. So that was one of the major cases where I wrote the majority opinion.