EVERY ONCE IN awhile, a member of the legal community reaches beyond the borders of our usual professional sphere and offers the general public a compassionate and compelling example of what it means to be a lawyer.

Such a person was Judge Margaret Quill Flynn, the twenty-eighth woman to be admitted to the NH Bar Association. She practiced law for 14 years in Massachusetts and for 28 years in New Hampshire before serving six years as a Superior Court judge. Along the way, she served actively on dozens of community boards and raised two daughters, who are each now professional women themselves.

Mandatory retirement at age 70 left Flynn wistfully regarding the legal books and binders that filled her house; she would have preferred to keep working. To "pick up the slack," as she put it then, she took college courses, and eagerly accepted special assignments from the court.

Most recently, at age 80, Flynn sat on the five-member panel specially appointed to hear the case brought by three sitting Supreme Court justices to recover legal fees and costs incurred during the course of their impeachment proceedings. Other members of that panel report that Flynn was very much in the thick of the debate.

The litany of "firsts" on her resume suggests that she sought the spotlight; but those who knew her remember her unwavering humility, and her relentless focus on the subject at hand, whether it related to her professional work, or a civic commitment.

"She was enormously successful in her chosen profession, while at the same time being exceedingly humble and understated," said Supreme Court Justice Linda S. Dalianis. "She left such a deep mark on the community at large - it’s hard to believe that one person could do that much," she added. "But you would never know it from her; she was very self-deprecating, and genuinely so."

Dalianis was admitted to the New Hampshire Bar in 1974. "The women who were entering the legal profession then had a cultural advantage," she said. "We were riding a wave of some acceptance for women entering professions generally. Flynn didn’t have that advantage; she was entering an entirely male profession, and for her to have made her mark in the face of all that is even more memorable."

Walter Murphy, recently retired Superior Court Chief Justice, cites Flynn as a wonderful role model for others. "She never sat still; she was always on the move, and usually for somebody else," he said. "She had so much dignity; and so much respect for the institution and for the people who appeared before her," Murphy added. "She was endlessly patient with people, but at the same time, she never let a litigant get the better of her, and she never let her buttons be pushed."

Dalianis agreed that Flynn was a role model, particularly in her ability to combine family and career. "She was able to balance her family and her profession in ways that many of us have not been able to do," Dalianis said. "That lessons extends to men as well as women; it is a lesson for anyone who is interested in being more than a driven professional."

Flynn grew up in the Boston suburb of Stoughton, Mass. Key role models for her were her own mother, a full-time homemaker, and an aunt with a business career that struck young Margaret as very exciting. Both women encouraged her to value family over a career; but early on Flynn resolved to attempt both.

After earning a Phi Beta Kappa key at Boston University, Flynn got her JD, magna cum laude, from BU School of Law in 1944, at age 22, after a stint as editor of the BU Law Review. During her first year at BU, she met her future husband, Charles J. Flynn, who was to become a NH Superior Court Justice in 1967.

From 1946 to 1958, Flynn was one of few women associates at the Boston law firm of Herrick & Smith. She married in 1950, at age 28, and moved to Nashua, and commuted by train to Boston.

With the birth of her first daughter, in 1958, Flynn resigned from the firm, and began writing briefs for her husband. Two years later she began arguing those briefs before the NH Supreme Court.

Following the birth of her second daughter, in 1962, Flynn continued to practice law in Nashua. Both her mother and her mother-in-law helped significantly with the day-to-day care of the children.

Flynn served as a superior court master from 1978 to 1982, and finally accepted an appointment to the superior court in 1986, at age 64.

Flynn’s civic contributions began with service on the Stoughton School Committee while she was still in her twenties. In Nashua, while her children were still young, she was elected to the Nashua Board of Education, on which she served for 15 years. Many other civic appointments followed, including years of involvement with Marguerite’s Place, a Nashua support center for women and children at risk.

Throughout, Flynn was unimpressed with her own abilities. She credited her Boston law career to the fact that many male law school graduates had gone off to serve in World War II; her Nashua practice was begun because her husband was busy and needed help.

When called by the governor’s office about the superior court position, Flynn first declined, feeling that she was too old. Her husband convinced her otherwise. Later she would comment that her broad experience had been very helpful to her work on the bench.

Flynn was a great talker, though "there was never a word of complaint about anything," remembers Murphy. In 1994, Attorney Joyce Donohue interviewed Flynn, then 72, for the Bar Association oral history project. Court reporters James Connelly, Jr. and Sr., provided a transcript, from which the following quotes are taken.

On the No. 1 quality in a judge:

[When Flynn was at the judicial college it was suggested that patience was the number one quality of a judge, followed by knowledge.] "That’s true … I think judicial temperament … is so important. I don’t care how brilliant you are, if you don’t have the patience and the willingness to listen, and you know, keep control, of course, of everything... but just brilliance alone is not enough. You’ve got to have the temperament to sit and listen and let people have their say, not too much, you know, not ride over you."

On family & career:

"I don’t want to be touting women, I’m touting justice and people being able to do their thing and do what they want in life. And, if you can have your kids, and as I say, my kids, you know, and my husband and my family are just, they’re everything in my life. I can’t believe a life without it. Except I think if I had to stay home and just do, just the wifely chores or something, and have that not have something else, I know I would never have been nearly as happy. And I don’t think my kids would have been happy."

On Sirois v. Laquerre, 103 NH 113 (1960), the first case she argued to the NH Supreme Court:

"In the back of my mind it worried me very greatly that if I lost the case they would blame my husband and they would say: well, you know, you let a woman argue it." [She won.]

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