By Robert Schlesinger
law community
When a ruling by a federal judge in Texas invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone last spring, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s team was ready. Three days after the decision, Healey and nearly two dozen local, state, and federal officials stood in the bright sun before the Massachusetts State House and announced an executive order affirming that state law protects mifepristone (a progesterone blocker also known as RU-486) and that, at Healey’s request, the University of Massachusetts had purchased more than a year’s worth of doses of the drug.
For the task of coordinating and overseeing that process, Healey had entrusted her senior advisor, Gabrielle “Gabe” Viator, JD ’06. “A good day is when we’re able to make a difference for people in the Commonwealth,” Viator recalls. “That was a really good day—we were able to make something happen.”
When there’s a fire, Viator says, she jumps in to coordinate. That analogy suits her well: She is the person Gov. Healey relies on when big and controversial issues—reproductive rights, immigration, affirmative action, for example—smolder and burn.
She is well-prepared for the job: Viator practiced commercial litigation at Ropes & Gray and was Healey’s chief of staff when the governor was attorney general of the Commonwealth. Viator also had staffing stints in both the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives.
Her political journey started when a drunken driver killed a classmate her sophomore year of high school in Gloucester. State Senator Bruce Tarr, who was her state representative at the time, was pushing to tighten drunken-driving laws, and young Gabe threw herself into the effort, testifying and helping rally support. She discovered she had a taste for politics and studied political science at Boston College before landing her first State House job.
During the day, she was building a network. “There’s a close-knit community here on Beacon Hill,” she says. It’s an enduring one: Many people she got to know then still work there, and she sees them regularly.
By night, she studied law at Suffolk. Viator jokes that the most important skills she learned at law school were time management and the ability to drink a lot of coffee—but the school had a profound effect on her, especially taking night classes with others who had day jobs. “In my classroom discussion, I had a police officer and a nurse and a pharmacist—people with experience in the classes who all brought their own perspective and experience,” she recalls.
She also got a strong legal grounding. She took Constitutional Law with Professor Gerry Clark shortly after the 2003 Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger decisions, where the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Professor Clark’s class lately because of the recent decision in the Harvard admissions case—and the work ahead,” she says. The high court overturned Grutter in June, ruling that race-based affirmative action violates the equal protection clause. Viator has helped consult with Massachusetts colleges and universities to figure out how they can maintain diversity within the bounds of the redrawn legal landscape.
While her Suffolk grounding informs her approach to work, Viator’s job encompasses more than legal issues. “In my current role, I’m sort of a recovering lawyer,” Viator quips. “I am most often trying not to be the lawyer in the room.” But of course law school prepares one for more than practicing. “Having a legal education is such an amazing foundation,” she says. “We have to analyze large quantities of information and problem-solve many, many times a day. Although I may not be practicing in the traditional sense, I am well-served by my legal background.”
Viator has also found time for family. She and her husband, Dan Fairweather, have two daughters, Emery and Ainsley, the latter named for a conservative lawyer on The West Wing—the only character upon whom Gabe and Dan, a Republican, could agree.
Asked what she would advise young lawyers, Viator says: “Take the opportunities presented to you.” She never had a five-year plan. She worked at Ropes & Gray after law school—hardly the public policy work that interested her. But it led to a fellowship where she spent a year working in the civil rights division of the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General, under her then-boss, Maura Healey. “The rest,” she says, “is history.”
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winter 2024
Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
