Same-sex marriage advocate joins Vermont Supreme Court

[William769]

MONTPELIER — Standing in nearly the same spot where she successfully argued the historic case before the state Supreme Court in 1999 that led to civil unions and eventually to same-sex marriage, Beth Robinson took another historic step as she was sworn in Monday afternoon as an associate justice of that court.


Robinson, 46, of Ferrisburgh became the state’s first openly gay Supreme Court justice in a ceremony before a crowd of about 150 family, friends and former and future colleagues. She was heralded for her intelligence, energy and fairness.

“My pledge is to remember the people,” Robinson told the crowd, noting that she has a love for legal interpretation but came to understand that legal cases are primarily about people.


Among those people, she said, were the plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont, a case Robinson said had been the pinnacle of her professional career until Monday. Robinson successfully argued that same-sex couples had the same rights as heterosexual married couples, then went on to lobby the Vermont Legislature for the nation’s first civil unions that passed in 2000 and the 2009 law that legalized same-sex marriage in the state. The crowd included two of the plaintiffs — Holly Puterbaugh and Lois Farnham and a host of others who worked with Robinson advocating for civil unions and marriage.

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