On February 14, 1994, Chief Judge Stephen Breyer (then of the First Circuit Court of Appeals) introduced me. Chief Judge Joseph Tauro administered the oath of office. I walked up to the podium and began:

"I have waited a long time to tell this story. It was June 1971. I was graduating from Yale Law School, well on my way to a prestigious clerkship with the Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.

"My mother and I were having a huge fight, the kind of fight only mothers and daughters can have. What were we fighting about? My mother wanted me to take the Triborough Bridge toll taker's test—just in case!"

The audience exploded in laughter. And then I added, "Excuse me for a moment," looked toward heaven, and said, "Ma! At last, a government job!"

My mother and father, Sadie and Moishe, could not have imagined this moment. I had lost my mother when I was 30, but my father was only recently gone. He died three days before President Bill Clinton called to nominate me as a U.S. judge. He was found in the easy chair in the living room where we had argued about politics for hours, until my mother would tell us to keep our voices down, and he gave up. "Go be a lawyer," he said, with his eyes twinkling.

And so I did, but hardly the lawyer he envisioned. Raised in the cauldron of the '60s, I came of age during the civil rights struggles and the women's movement of the '70s. And during the next 24 years, I did work I believed in, often for clients I loved.

I was a criminal defense lawyer and a civil rights lawyer, a trial lawyer and an appellate lawyer, a practitioner and a teacher. I would try a murder case defending a battered woman one day and a sexual harassment case the next. I would stand as proudly next to high-profile clients—CEOs, politicians, activists—as I would next to the woman or man whose name the judge kept on mispronouncing in a case the newspapers ignored.

I would join my husband, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in successfully challenging abortion restrictions under the Massachusetts Constitution or representing demonstrators at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. I argued at all levels, in state and federal courts across the country. I joined hands with other young lawyers, mainly women, meeting annually at "Women and the Law" conferences across the country, sharing stories and strategies about our work and listening reverently to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now Justice Ginsburg, or the late Katie Roraback (a criminal defense lawyer and civil rights activist).

After a work life spent doing what I thought was right, I offered my name for nomination to the bench. As my interview with Senator Edward Kennedy was ending, I told him that I had a bone to pick with him. I thought I could hear a staff member's sharp intake of breath as in, "Oh my God. Where is she going now?"

"A judgeship is supposed to reward a distinguished career," I said. "If you value civil liberties and civil rights work, then once, just once—it doesn't have to be me—you should recommend such a person for a judgeship."

And he did as only an extraordinary senator and human being could.

So began my next chapter—14 years thus far on the bench of the District Court of Massachusetts. Every day I strive to make certain that the justice system lives up to the promise of its name; that it is just and fair. In that regard, I continue to do the work I believe in, albeit from a different vantage point and in a different role. It is a long distance from the Triborough Bridge toll taker's job and that small kitchen in Queens.