Jeffery L. Amestoy

My name is Jeff Amestoy and I am a native of Rutland, Vermont.  After college in the east and law school in the west, I returned to Vermont where I was an assistant attorney general under then-Attorney General Jim Jeffords. In 1984 after having served as commissioner of labor and industry under Governor Snelling, I was elected attorney general and re-elected six times.

In 1997, Governor Howard Dean appointed me to the Supreme Court, and I was Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court for eight years. Probably most noteworthy during our time was addressing the issue of same-sex marriage, which (particularly before the turn of the century) was an extraordinarily divisive issue. We issued an opinion, Baker v Vermont, in which we found that constitutionally, there is a right to all the privileges and responsibilities of marriage in Vermont. That case then went to Vermont eventually becoming the first state in the Union to adopt same-sex marriage by legislation, and we were the first court in the country to recognize the same-sex relationships. So that was an extraordinary part of my own time on the court.

Following my time on the court, I was a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. While at Harvard, I wrote a book, Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. which was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. That was my first endeavor into living in the archives.