During the first eight of the eleven years Mary Mullarkey ’68 served as judge on the Colorado Supreme Court, she was the only woman, "all by my lonesome." Did the addition to the court of another female justice three years ago make a difference? "Oh, absolutely," she says. "My working life got a lot better."

Now, it has happened again. The state’s highest court will finally "move past tokenism" when it seats its third female justice this fall.

Mullarkey says that she and her fellow justices in Denver—male and female alike—will travel throughout the state in the coming year to "take the pulse" of the district courts, all part of a national initiative to boost public confidence in the judicial system.

But that’s not the only way Mullarkey is on the move. Last summer her supreme court colleagues elected her chief justice, making her the first woman in history to hold Colorado’s number-one judicial post.

Janet Hawkins