By Liz Nass
Gongwer News Service
Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh works every day in the same office her father, Michael Cavanagh, did during his Supreme Court tenure. In fact, there are signs of him everywhere, his portrait and memorabilia from his campaigns adorn the back wall.
She also moved her father’s favorite portraits of other past justices into the office. Some, she said, sat at her dinner table as a child. A quilt made by Cavanagh’s mother, Patricia Cavanagh, lines the office hallway. Her bookshelves are covered with pictures of her two daughters, Georgia and Eloise.
Cavanagh, who comes from a long line of attorneys and public servants, jokes her own family pictures as a child were limited to every eight years for reelection photo shoots for her father’s judgeships.
While her family has leaned into public service and law – 24 out of her 36 cousins are lawyers – Cavanagh said her father never pushed her in that direction. In fact, he encouraged her to try other avenues first.
“My dad actually was the one who was like, we have way too many lawyers, like he jokes that we're the most useless family because we can't build anything, fix anything. You should go do it,” Cavanagh said.
On a Thursday in June when Gongwer News Service interviewed Cavanagh for this profile, her daughter Georgia is also in the office, spending her summer away from college recovering from ACL surgery on her mom’s office couch.
It’s also Reunification Day – which is all about family – where previously separated families due to run ins in the law are once again reunited. Cavanagh said the work to make days like this happen and keep families together is one of her biggest motivators.
Her daughter and Justice Kimberly Thomas hug in the back of the room, friendly, like she’s just part of the family, too. John Nevin, the court’s longtime spokesperson, said in the past few years, the number of hugs passed out across the bench has gone up exponentially, and the court is just “warmer.”
Cavanagh is a family name for anyone paying attention to Michigan politics in the last century. Justice Cavanagh’s uncle, Jerome Cavanagh, served as Detroit Mayor from 1962-70. Her father, of course, was also chief justice of the Supreme Court starting in 1983 until 2015 and a Court of Appeals judge before that. Her first cousin, Phil Cavanagh, served in the House and the Wayne County Commission. Phil’s daughter, also her cousin, is Sen. Mary Cavanagh, who currently represents Redford Township and part of Detroit.
Cavanagh said her family is what makes her tick, and her happy place is when all four kids, her two daughters and two stepchildren, are together. She speaks fondly of her father, who passed away last year, calling him a confidante and a steady sounding board throughout her career.
Phil, her cousin, said while public service is great and at the forefront of the Cavanagh family, the family’s first responsibility is raising good kids, and Justice Cavanagh has done a wonderful job with that.
Although Phil is 10 years older than Justice Cavanagh, he remembers the big family get togethers where they got to hang out and go swimming.
Now, he has gotten the honor of watching her career blossom. He said he thinks being able to carry on some of her father’s core beliefs at the court brings her gratification.
Georgia said every time they go somewhere in the law community, everyone tells her how she has the “coolest mom” and she should always be proud of her. When people say things like that, Georgia said, she tends to think it’s just people being nice. But she said it’s true; her mother is an inspiration for her.
“It's just like a lot of like family to look up to, but it's always like even though she has this big job, she's still mom first,” Georgia said.
—Her journey into law
Cavanagh attended the University of Michigan for engineering, influenced by math and science teachers who saw her potential and thought she could be a trailblazer. At the time, not many women were going into engineering.
She didn’t enjoy her classes but found the work more fulfilling, working in Toledo and Troy, conducting environmental assessments for engineering projects. She found a quiet love in the research and history aspect of it, including risk assessment, and eventually gravitated toward the law side of engineering.
Georgia is also going into engineering, citing her mom as the inspiration. Justice Cavanagh has now taken on the mantle of being the parent who asks if they are making choices for themselves or because they feel pushed in a certain direction due to the family legacy. Georgia is sure this is what she wants to pursue for now but may find her way into law, if she chooses.
Cavanagh said she was resistant at first to going back to school because she preferred the work, but when she found her way to Wayne State University for law school, mostly night classes while working full-time, she loved it.
Her first job was in patent litigation, looking to combine her expertise in engineering and law, but found it wasn’t for her. She didn’t get as much opportunity for research and writing, what she considers her bread and butter, and didn’t get much variety, working on one case for two years.
She thought back to her time as a law clerk at an almost all-women run appellate department at a law firm in Detroit. She spent 15 years at Garan Lucow Miller PC, moving up in the firm as a shareholder. She was also honored as Lawyer of the Year in 2006 in Michigan’s Lawyer Weekly and a Woman in the Law in 2017.
Stacey King, a partner at Garan at the same time as Cavanagh, said her first impression of her was highly intellectual, extroverted and the same person in every room – friends, family and coworkers.
“I always felt she was down to earth but always so much smarter than me,” King said.
She said, as a lawyer, Cavanagh is the whole package. There was never any question that she was the right person for leadership, always sharing her sense of humor and personality with everyone in the office. She’s a well-rounded person in all aspects, King said.
She never shows up unprepared to any argument, King said. She is always confident in her position and backed by evidence, and when she’s not, she works out every kink in the argument until there isn’t any left.
—Running for the highest court
The chief justice is good at being a politician because she doesn’t act like regular politicians, King said. She speaks honestly, she said, and it makes people want to follow and vote for her.
King said the entire office was supportive of her decision to campaign for the Supreme Court, because to them, it only made sense. Campaigning was a huge time suck for Cavanagh, she said, but she still handled cases and was arguing in front of the appellate courts at the same time as running for the seat.
When Cavanagh’s father, Michael, retired from his seat on the bench in 2014, she thought about running, but the timing wasn’t great. She was going through a divorce and running the house as a single mom of two young kids. But in 2017, when she was in a better position in her personal life, she decided to take the leap even though her father emphasized the importance of the traditional path to the bench: starting out on trial court, moving your way to the Court of Appeals and then taking your shot.
Justice Cavanagh is one of just a few non-incumbent candidates for the Supreme Court to unseat an incumbent justice in modern times. In 2018, Justice Elizabeth Clement was the top vote-getter and won reelection. That meant the real race was for the second seat up for election. Justice Kurtis Wilder had been appointed to the bench by Republican then-Gov. Rick Snyder and was seeking to retain his seat. But Cavanagh, a nominee of the Michigan Democratic Party, topped him by 1 percentage point.
Now, Cavanagh tells young people on the legal track that there isn’t just one way to get on the bench.
“We talk to school kids groups a lot and there's such pressure to know what you want to be when you're 17 that you have to know where you're going to be at 55, and it's just not possible,” she said.
However, once Cavanagh told her father she was all in on running for the seat, he was her biggest supporter.
She has grown up around campaigning, she said, and as a kid it was always fun: stuffing envelopes over a pizza night. It’s not until you’re running one that you know the full extent, she said.
Supreme Court races have gotten more expensive, an extra emphasis on raising money than in her father’s era, making it more intimidating, she said. There were times she would wake up in the middle of the night wondering if she was doing it right, questioning what she was doing at all.
There were seemingly always more rooms she could be in and people to meet.
Running now for reelection to her seat this year is both easier and harder than her first bid, she said. Although she has more flexibility with grown children, a supportive husband and enjoys talking about her work on the court, she also has three jobs: a justice, a chief justice and a politician.
More voters are also more engaged in Supreme Court races, as people are realizing the role the courts play in affecting their lives and policy. It’s also more of an educational role when running for a judgeship, explaining the importance of the nonpartisan side of the ballot.
She misses some of the memories she made with her kids on the first race: stopping on their Upper Peninsula tour to jump into the lakes. Now, she works on a planned itinerary.
—Taking on the responsibility of the bench
When she won the seat, her father was the one to swear her in.
It was good to have his historical memory to guide her, working with 22 different justices across his time on the court. She said he had a great perspective of the bigger picture of the institution as a whole, something she carries with her.
“He was always reminding me a lot of people sat in this seat long before you, long before him, and God willing, more will sit long after us,” Cavanagh said.
He’s also always present in the building, she said, working with many people who knew him and who tell her the best stories, whether that was him stopping everything to give someone advice on whether they should go back to school or how to max out their retirement benefits.
Sitting on the bench, finally, was a big awakening. She was sworn in January 1, 2019, and had her first case call on January 3. She jumped in on 13 cases right away.
It was a big shift from the appellate process as an attorney where once you’re in front of the Supreme Court, standing on the other side of the bench many times in the last 15 years, the argument is over, she said. You know where you stand, the briefs have been written and it’s the end of the road.
Cavanagh assumed she had to go into every oral argument knowing where she stood, but the justices are in the middle of the process, constantly swayed by the points made by both sides of the case and each other’s questions.
It was also a steep learning curve in adapting to areas of law she has never practiced, something most attorneys never experience, being experts all the time, both in their case and their law practice.
She wasn’t anticipating how fast she would ascend to chief justice, and for a long time, it felt like drinking from a fire hose. Her fellow justices elected her to replace Clement after Clement’s surprise departure in 2025. She still has a sticky note on her laptop from those first moments of leadership; it reads “yet.”
“You don't know the answer, but you really don't know the answer yet,” Cavanagh said. “You will know the answer, right? But that was a period of I don't know the answer to this, and your job, and your career, and how you structure your life, is knowing the answer to these things, and then you're in a new environment, and you don't know.”
Cavanagh carries around a couple short phrases with her to get through the day like “GETMO,” or “good enough to move on.” She said it guides her decision-making at times where she’s sifted through every argument she can, a point to feel satisfied with her perspective.
Her normal day-to-day consists of sitting at her laptop and reading. Every month, the court receives anywhere from 100 to 140 applications to review the case following a Court of Appeals action. Twenty cases per week get a deeper dive discussion, then the court whittles down the cases from there. The rest of her time is spent talking to clerks about what they’re taking away from the close reading.
An added responsibility Cavanagh has embraced is outreach to lower courts and the administration of courts in general, wanting to show that Supreme Court justices value and prioritize the work all their justice system partners are doing.
Now, the focus has shifted to opinion writing, as July 31 deadline for calendar cases, including many high stakes decisions like a Line 5 case with Enbridge, nears. It’s a big job, getting seven pens in the mix, she said, but it usually makes for a better product.
At the end of the day, she said the justices all work together well, she said, but it takes a lot of compromise.
Clement met Cavanagh when she was campaigning, seeing she was dedicated but also approachable and authentic. They were running against each other at the time – the two of them running alongside two other major party nominees for two seats – but there was no animosity or awkwardness she said, instead they had a connection off the bat.
Clement said Cavanagh has no ego even though she comes from a political family.
“She was working so hard, and she didn't take for granted that because of who she was, or what family she came from, that she was necessarily going to win the seat,” Clement said.
Clement said Cavanagh came to the court with a lot of questions, digging in immediately, not worried about if it seemed like a simple question but instead worked especially hard on the cases she wasn’t familiar with. Cavanagh also brings calmness and stability to the bench with her, Clement said.
Even though the job is difficult, Clement said, they always had fun together, even if they were on opposite sides of an argument, which they often were.
One memorable moment Clement had with Cavanagh was after the coronavirus pandemic when Clement would bring her dog into the office with her. As Clement was showing brand-new law clerks around the office, she introduced them to Cavanagh as she was sitting on the floor of Clement’s office playing with the dog. Their first conversation with them was not law but how much she loves dogs.
“They haven't met most of the people on the court, and their first impression is of her just totally relaxed, a normal person sitting on the floor so that she can snuggle a puppy,” Clement said.
Another skill Cavanagh learned from her father that she brings to the bench is empathy, putting herself in the shoes of the person in front of her and recognizing there are real people behind the decisions the court makes. It doesn’t mean she substitutes her emotion for the law, Cavanagh said, but she decides with the knowledge of her impact.
It can be an isolating job, to solve other people's problems and ingest secondary trauma from the cases they read. She said it can take a toll, but the ones that make the biggest impact are parental rights and custody battles, as she puts herself in the perspective of every family, even if they look different from her own.
—Cavanagh outside of the office
King said Cavanagh has always emphasized balance in her life, in work and family.
Cavanagh said she always tries to keep all her priorities straight, but one burner simply must burn less hot than the others. For example, she said if she’s a good attorney and a good daughter on any given day, then the laundry isn’t getting done.
One way she stays balanced? Yoga. She has a goal of hitting one-hour classes four to six times per week during slower days, but currently, she’s happy to just get away from her caseload for just an hour even if it’s just a quick walk. It’s not about physical strength but the brain break.
“I learned at the end of the hour that I hadn't thought about all the things that were going on in my head and that I have to do, and they would still be there when I got out and that helped a lot,” Cavanagh said.
It’s all about knowing what balls you are juggling, and which ones could hypothetically drop if it comes to that point, she said. Two of the glass balls that she cannot drop are her kids and family.
Clement said Cavanagh is a chatterbox and open, saying she could talk to her for an hour about just about anything.
Cavanagh was surprised to hear this. She says she was a very shy kid, and with her family’s big personalities, she felt like other people took up more oxygen than she did. She said maybe that’s why she tends to talk more around the conference table now.
Her biggest inspirations and motivators are the responsibility of the job, the recognition of the importance of the judicial branch with every opinion the justices write and the future of the court, passing it along for generations to come, just like her father to her.
The inspiration also stems from the boots-on-the-ground work of others that come before her in a different way: the trial courts, the problem-solving courts, the treatment courts and other community programs.
“They know the people that are coming in front of them, they know what their problems are, they're seeing them as human. That to me is really inspiring, that you can have that much of an impact on changing the course of somebody who's struggling, and let's face it, anybody who's coming into contact with the justice system is struggling in one way or another,” Cavanagh said.
“It is their worst day, and there are judges who have had kids sleep in their courtrooms or in their offices because they couldn't get them in a juvenile home or whatever it may be. These are people doing the work of really taking care of people's lives and trying to help them better their lives, so that those are the ones who inspire me.”
She points to the judges downstairs during the interview, reuniting parents with their children. It’s more than pulling a book off the shelf, reading the law and heading off to the bench; it’s looking the problem in the face to ask what the real issues are.
Cavanagh said this is her dream job. Although it could be welcome by the end of her chief justice term to devote more time to just being a justice without the administrative responsibilities, she “love, love, loves doing this job.”
What makes all this work worth it for Cavanagh?
She says it’s seeing the people she helps, at events like adoption days and treatment court graduations. Cavanagh said she also enjoys seeing the results of a task force and an initiative to improve the number of juvenile attorneys come to fruition with better parent and child representation. It’s a long list of other people’s work and initiatives she’s introduced coming down the pipeline, the work not quite done yet, but pushing ahead anyway.
After the interview, Justice Thomas runs up to Cavanagh with a surprise: If she moves fast enough, she can catch the Lansing Police Department K-9s downstairs along with the bubble party set up for the children spending their day in the Hall of Justice. Cavanagh rushes off to grab her daughter and join the fun.
Gongwer News Service
Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh works every day in the same office her father, Michael Cavanagh, did during his Supreme Court tenure. In fact, there are signs of him everywhere, his portrait and memorabilia from his campaigns adorn the back wall.
She also moved her father’s favorite portraits of other past justices into the office. Some, she said, sat at her dinner table as a child. A quilt made by Cavanagh’s mother, Patricia Cavanagh, lines the office hallway. Her bookshelves are covered with pictures of her two daughters, Georgia and Eloise.
Cavanagh, who comes from a long line of attorneys and public servants, jokes her own family pictures as a child were limited to every eight years for reelection photo shoots for her father’s judgeships.
While her family has leaned into public service and law – 24 out of her 36 cousins are lawyers – Cavanagh said her father never pushed her in that direction. In fact, he encouraged her to try other avenues first.
“My dad actually was the one who was like, we have way too many lawyers, like he jokes that we're the most useless family because we can't build anything, fix anything. You should go do it,” Cavanagh said.
On a Thursday in June when Gongwer News Service interviewed Cavanagh for this profile, her daughter Georgia is also in the office, spending her summer away from college recovering from ACL surgery on her mom’s office couch.
It’s also Reunification Day – which is all about family – where previously separated families due to run ins in the law are once again reunited. Cavanagh said the work to make days like this happen and keep families together is one of her biggest motivators.
Her daughter and Justice Kimberly Thomas hug in the back of the room, friendly, like she’s just part of the family, too. John Nevin, the court’s longtime spokesperson, said in the past few years, the number of hugs passed out across the bench has gone up exponentially, and the court is just “warmer.”
Cavanagh is a family name for anyone paying attention to Michigan politics in the last century. Justice Cavanagh’s uncle, Jerome Cavanagh, served as Detroit Mayor from 1962-70. Her father, of course, was also chief justice of the Supreme Court starting in 1983 until 2015 and a Court of Appeals judge before that. Her first cousin, Phil Cavanagh, served in the House and the Wayne County Commission. Phil’s daughter, also her cousin, is Sen. Mary Cavanagh, who currently represents Redford Township and part of Detroit.
Cavanagh said her family is what makes her tick, and her happy place is when all four kids, her two daughters and two stepchildren, are together. She speaks fondly of her father, who passed away last year, calling him a confidante and a steady sounding board throughout her career.
Phil, her cousin, said while public service is great and at the forefront of the Cavanagh family, the family’s first responsibility is raising good kids, and Justice Cavanagh has done a wonderful job with that.
Although Phil is 10 years older than Justice Cavanagh, he remembers the big family get togethers where they got to hang out and go swimming.
Now, he has gotten the honor of watching her career blossom. He said he thinks being able to carry on some of her father’s core beliefs at the court brings her gratification.
Georgia said every time they go somewhere in the law community, everyone tells her how she has the “coolest mom” and she should always be proud of her. When people say things like that, Georgia said, she tends to think it’s just people being nice. But she said it’s true; her mother is an inspiration for her.
“It's just like a lot of like family to look up to, but it's always like even though she has this big job, she's still mom first,” Georgia said.
—Her journey into law
Cavanagh attended the University of Michigan for engineering, influenced by math and science teachers who saw her potential and thought she could be a trailblazer. At the time, not many women were going into engineering.
She didn’t enjoy her classes but found the work more fulfilling, working in Toledo and Troy, conducting environmental assessments for engineering projects. She found a quiet love in the research and history aspect of it, including risk assessment, and eventually gravitated toward the law side of engineering.
Georgia is also going into engineering, citing her mom as the inspiration. Justice Cavanagh has now taken on the mantle of being the parent who asks if they are making choices for themselves or because they feel pushed in a certain direction due to the family legacy. Georgia is sure this is what she wants to pursue for now but may find her way into law, if she chooses.
Cavanagh said she was resistant at first to going back to school because she preferred the work, but when she found her way to Wayne State University for law school, mostly night classes while working full-time, she loved it.
Her first job was in patent litigation, looking to combine her expertise in engineering and law, but found it wasn’t for her. She didn’t get as much opportunity for research and writing, what she considers her bread and butter, and didn’t get much variety, working on one case for two years.
She thought back to her time as a law clerk at an almost all-women run appellate department at a law firm in Detroit. She spent 15 years at Garan Lucow Miller PC, moving up in the firm as a shareholder. She was also honored as Lawyer of the Year in 2006 in Michigan’s Lawyer Weekly and a Woman in the Law in 2017.
Stacey King, a partner at Garan at the same time as Cavanagh, said her first impression of her was highly intellectual, extroverted and the same person in every room – friends, family and coworkers.
“I always felt she was down to earth but always so much smarter than me,” King said.
She said, as a lawyer, Cavanagh is the whole package. There was never any question that she was the right person for leadership, always sharing her sense of humor and personality with everyone in the office. She’s a well-rounded person in all aspects, King said.
She never shows up unprepared to any argument, King said. She is always confident in her position and backed by evidence, and when she’s not, she works out every kink in the argument until there isn’t any left.
—Running for the highest court
The chief justice is good at being a politician because she doesn’t act like regular politicians, King said. She speaks honestly, she said, and it makes people want to follow and vote for her.
King said the entire office was supportive of her decision to campaign for the Supreme Court, because to them, it only made sense. Campaigning was a huge time suck for Cavanagh, she said, but she still handled cases and was arguing in front of the appellate courts at the same time as running for the seat.
When Cavanagh’s father, Michael, retired from his seat on the bench in 2014, she thought about running, but the timing wasn’t great. She was going through a divorce and running the house as a single mom of two young kids. But in 2017, when she was in a better position in her personal life, she decided to take the leap even though her father emphasized the importance of the traditional path to the bench: starting out on trial court, moving your way to the Court of Appeals and then taking your shot.
Justice Cavanagh is one of just a few non-incumbent candidates for the Supreme Court to unseat an incumbent justice in modern times. In 2018, Justice Elizabeth Clement was the top vote-getter and won reelection. That meant the real race was for the second seat up for election. Justice Kurtis Wilder had been appointed to the bench by Republican then-Gov. Rick Snyder and was seeking to retain his seat. But Cavanagh, a nominee of the Michigan Democratic Party, topped him by 1 percentage point.
Now, Cavanagh tells young people on the legal track that there isn’t just one way to get on the bench.
“We talk to school kids groups a lot and there's such pressure to know what you want to be when you're 17 that you have to know where you're going to be at 55, and it's just not possible,” she said.
However, once Cavanagh told her father she was all in on running for the seat, he was her biggest supporter.
She has grown up around campaigning, she said, and as a kid it was always fun: stuffing envelopes over a pizza night. It’s not until you’re running one that you know the full extent, she said.
Supreme Court races have gotten more expensive, an extra emphasis on raising money than in her father’s era, making it more intimidating, she said. There were times she would wake up in the middle of the night wondering if she was doing it right, questioning what she was doing at all.
There were seemingly always more rooms she could be in and people to meet.
Running now for reelection to her seat this year is both easier and harder than her first bid, she said. Although she has more flexibility with grown children, a supportive husband and enjoys talking about her work on the court, she also has three jobs: a justice, a chief justice and a politician.
More voters are also more engaged in Supreme Court races, as people are realizing the role the courts play in affecting their lives and policy. It’s also more of an educational role when running for a judgeship, explaining the importance of the nonpartisan side of the ballot.
She misses some of the memories she made with her kids on the first race: stopping on their Upper Peninsula tour to jump into the lakes. Now, she works on a planned itinerary.
—Taking on the responsibility of the bench
When she won the seat, her father was the one to swear her in.
It was good to have his historical memory to guide her, working with 22 different justices across his time on the court. She said he had a great perspective of the bigger picture of the institution as a whole, something she carries with her.
“He was always reminding me a lot of people sat in this seat long before you, long before him, and God willing, more will sit long after us,” Cavanagh said.
He’s also always present in the building, she said, working with many people who knew him and who tell her the best stories, whether that was him stopping everything to give someone advice on whether they should go back to school or how to max out their retirement benefits.
Sitting on the bench, finally, was a big awakening. She was sworn in January 1, 2019, and had her first case call on January 3. She jumped in on 13 cases right away.
It was a big shift from the appellate process as an attorney where once you’re in front of the Supreme Court, standing on the other side of the bench many times in the last 15 years, the argument is over, she said. You know where you stand, the briefs have been written and it’s the end of the road.
Cavanagh assumed she had to go into every oral argument knowing where she stood, but the justices are in the middle of the process, constantly swayed by the points made by both sides of the case and each other’s questions.
It was also a steep learning curve in adapting to areas of law she has never practiced, something most attorneys never experience, being experts all the time, both in their case and their law practice.
She wasn’t anticipating how fast she would ascend to chief justice, and for a long time, it felt like drinking from a fire hose. Her fellow justices elected her to replace Clement after Clement’s surprise departure in 2025. She still has a sticky note on her laptop from those first moments of leadership; it reads “yet.”
“You don't know the answer, but you really don't know the answer yet,” Cavanagh said. “You will know the answer, right? But that was a period of I don't know the answer to this, and your job, and your career, and how you structure your life, is knowing the answer to these things, and then you're in a new environment, and you don't know.”
Cavanagh carries around a couple short phrases with her to get through the day like “GETMO,” or “good enough to move on.” She said it guides her decision-making at times where she’s sifted through every argument she can, a point to feel satisfied with her perspective.
Her normal day-to-day consists of sitting at her laptop and reading. Every month, the court receives anywhere from 100 to 140 applications to review the case following a Court of Appeals action. Twenty cases per week get a deeper dive discussion, then the court whittles down the cases from there. The rest of her time is spent talking to clerks about what they’re taking away from the close reading.
An added responsibility Cavanagh has embraced is outreach to lower courts and the administration of courts in general, wanting to show that Supreme Court justices value and prioritize the work all their justice system partners are doing.
Now, the focus has shifted to opinion writing, as July 31 deadline for calendar cases, including many high stakes decisions like a Line 5 case with Enbridge, nears. It’s a big job, getting seven pens in the mix, she said, but it usually makes for a better product.
At the end of the day, she said the justices all work together well, she said, but it takes a lot of compromise.
Clement met Cavanagh when she was campaigning, seeing she was dedicated but also approachable and authentic. They were running against each other at the time – the two of them running alongside two other major party nominees for two seats – but there was no animosity or awkwardness she said, instead they had a connection off the bat.
Clement said Cavanagh has no ego even though she comes from a political family.
“She was working so hard, and she didn't take for granted that because of who she was, or what family she came from, that she was necessarily going to win the seat,” Clement said.
Clement said Cavanagh came to the court with a lot of questions, digging in immediately, not worried about if it seemed like a simple question but instead worked especially hard on the cases she wasn’t familiar with. Cavanagh also brings calmness and stability to the bench with her, Clement said.
Even though the job is difficult, Clement said, they always had fun together, even if they were on opposite sides of an argument, which they often were.
One memorable moment Clement had with Cavanagh was after the coronavirus pandemic when Clement would bring her dog into the office with her. As Clement was showing brand-new law clerks around the office, she introduced them to Cavanagh as she was sitting on the floor of Clement’s office playing with the dog. Their first conversation with them was not law but how much she loves dogs.
“They haven't met most of the people on the court, and their first impression is of her just totally relaxed, a normal person sitting on the floor so that she can snuggle a puppy,” Clement said.
Another skill Cavanagh learned from her father that she brings to the bench is empathy, putting herself in the shoes of the person in front of her and recognizing there are real people behind the decisions the court makes. It doesn’t mean she substitutes her emotion for the law, Cavanagh said, but she decides with the knowledge of her impact.
It can be an isolating job, to solve other people's problems and ingest secondary trauma from the cases they read. She said it can take a toll, but the ones that make the biggest impact are parental rights and custody battles, as she puts herself in the perspective of every family, even if they look different from her own.
—Cavanagh outside of the office
King said Cavanagh has always emphasized balance in her life, in work and family.
Cavanagh said she always tries to keep all her priorities straight, but one burner simply must burn less hot than the others. For example, she said if she’s a good attorney and a good daughter on any given day, then the laundry isn’t getting done.
One way she stays balanced? Yoga. She has a goal of hitting one-hour classes four to six times per week during slower days, but currently, she’s happy to just get away from her caseload for just an hour even if it’s just a quick walk. It’s not about physical strength but the brain break.
“I learned at the end of the hour that I hadn't thought about all the things that were going on in my head and that I have to do, and they would still be there when I got out and that helped a lot,” Cavanagh said.
It’s all about knowing what balls you are juggling, and which ones could hypothetically drop if it comes to that point, she said. Two of the glass balls that she cannot drop are her kids and family.
Clement said Cavanagh is a chatterbox and open, saying she could talk to her for an hour about just about anything.
Cavanagh was surprised to hear this. She says she was a very shy kid, and with her family’s big personalities, she felt like other people took up more oxygen than she did. She said maybe that’s why she tends to talk more around the conference table now.
Her biggest inspirations and motivators are the responsibility of the job, the recognition of the importance of the judicial branch with every opinion the justices write and the future of the court, passing it along for generations to come, just like her father to her.
The inspiration also stems from the boots-on-the-ground work of others that come before her in a different way: the trial courts, the problem-solving courts, the treatment courts and other community programs.
“They know the people that are coming in front of them, they know what their problems are, they're seeing them as human. That to me is really inspiring, that you can have that much of an impact on changing the course of somebody who's struggling, and let's face it, anybody who's coming into contact with the justice system is struggling in one way or another,” Cavanagh said.
“It is their worst day, and there are judges who have had kids sleep in their courtrooms or in their offices because they couldn't get them in a juvenile home or whatever it may be. These are people doing the work of really taking care of people's lives and trying to help them better their lives, so that those are the ones who inspire me.”
She points to the judges downstairs during the interview, reuniting parents with their children. It’s more than pulling a book off the shelf, reading the law and heading off to the bench; it’s looking the problem in the face to ask what the real issues are.
Cavanagh said this is her dream job. Although it could be welcome by the end of her chief justice term to devote more time to just being a justice without the administrative responsibilities, she “love, love, loves doing this job.”
What makes all this work worth it for Cavanagh?
She says it’s seeing the people she helps, at events like adoption days and treatment court graduations. Cavanagh said she also enjoys seeing the results of a task force and an initiative to improve the number of juvenile attorneys come to fruition with better parent and child representation. It’s a long list of other people’s work and initiatives she’s introduced coming down the pipeline, the work not quite done yet, but pushing ahead anyway.
After the interview, Justice Thomas runs up to Cavanagh with a surprise: If she moves fast enough, she can catch the Lansing Police Department K-9s downstairs along with the bubble party set up for the children spending their day in the Hall of Justice. Cavanagh rushes off to grab her daughter and join the fun.
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