Draft:Wendy Sibbison

Wendy Sibbison (born November 10, 1946) is a Massachusetts appellate lawyer who specializes in both civil and criminal appeals. In 2006 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. In 2009 Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly identified her among the state’s "100 most influential attorneys".

Sibbison’s work has been covered in The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly has run front page features on Sibbison and her cases, which have set precedent, numerous times. An early highlight of her career was the 1980 case of Bezio v. Patenaude, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled for the first time in the United States that “a mother’s sexual preference per se is irrelevant to a consideration of her parental skills.”   Sibbison is among the lawyers spotlighted in the book Breaking Barriers: The Unfinished Story of Women Lawyers and Judges in Massachusetts. She retired from the practice of law in 2016.

Education
Sibbison was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, grew up in Northern Virginia, and graduated from St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1964. In 1968 she received a B.A. in English from Barnard College, where she studied with the feminist writer and activist Kate Millett and the feminist scholar Catherine Stimpson. She spent her senior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying with the Herman Melville scholar Merton Sealts. With Sealts’ encouragement she won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to continue her studies at Columbia University, where she earned a Master’s degree in English in 1969, receiving high honors for her thesis on Melville.

In 1977 she received her J.D. degree from Rutgers School of Law - Newark, where she studied with the constitutional scholars and litigators Arthur Kinoy and Frank Askin. At graduation she was honored as the student with the most outstanding legal skills.

Legal Career
Over the course of her career, Sibbison litigated over 170 state and federal appeals to conclusion, including 67 cases in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, where her clients prevailed in 36 of those cases. In 1996 Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly named Sibbison Lawyer of the Year for her work on Heins v. Ledis, a precedent-setting alimony decision, and Nylander v. Potter, a precedent-setting land use decision. She was again named Lawyer of the Year in 2010 for Commonwealth v. Cohen,   where the Supreme Judicial Court recognized the constitutional right to a public trial.

Sibbison is noted for reversing ten first-degree murder convictions, and her career included many precedent-setting cases, including Perchemlides v. Frizzle, establishing a parent’s constitutional right to educate their children at home,   Rotkiewicz v. Sadowsky, establishing that criticism of a police officer is constitutionally protected,  Messing, Rudavsky & Weliky, P.C., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, holding that it was wrong to punish employment discrimination lawyers for interviewing employees of the defendant company without the company's permission,    and Commonwealth v. Martin, holding that police violated a young Black man’s constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches when they stopped and frisked him merely for walking in a high-crime neighborhood.

Sibbison represented a number of high-profile criminal defendants, including Suzanne D’Amour, accused of hiring her lover to murder her wealthy husband,   Gaetano Milano, accused of murdering Billy “The Wild Guy” Grasso, the underboss of the Patriarca crime family,  and Richard Mandile, accused of shooting and robbing an elderly man. She won appeals resulting in multimillion dollar verdicts for her clients, including a case of first impression yielding a $4.75 million post-appeal settlement, and a $27 million verdict against Bank of America.

Honors
Sibbison is the 2001 recipient of the Edward J. Duggan Private Counsel Award, given by the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services for "zealous advocacy and outstanding legal services to the poor". In 2011 the Massachusetts Bar Foundation honored her with its President’s Award for her dedication to the MBF’s mission and for "tireless advocacy" on behalf of the nonprofit legal aid providers of Western Massachusetts. In 2014 Sibbison was chosen as the first recipient of the Brownlow Speer Award, created by the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in recognition of excellence in appellate advocacy in the defense of the accused.

Pro bono work
Sibbison served on the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Bar Foundation for seven years and represented her precinct on the Town Council of Greenfield, MA, for thirteen years. She also served on the Rules Advisory Committee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and as a Hearing Committee member for the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers. In 2018 she was a founder of the Immigrant Protection Project of Western Massachusetts, which recruited volunteer lawyers to free immigrants from detention while their asylum claims were pending, a project now run by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Center for Public Representation, a nonprofit public interest law firm that advocates for the rights of people with mental disabilities.

Publications
In 2021 Sibbison published a historical novel, Helen in Trouble, about illegal abortion in 1963. Kirkus Reviews, awarded the book a star for “exceptional merit.” Sibbison is also the author of Massachusetts Divorce: A Consumer Guide (MCLE 1996) and the editor of Directory for Research on the Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts (Center for the Study of the Pioneer Valley, Greenfield Community College, 1983).

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