Middleboro Review 2: Critics of the Legislature’s productivity ignore a key legal distinction setting Mass. apart from nearly all other states

Sunday, September 6, 2026

Critics of the Legislature’s productivity ignore a key legal distinction setting Mass. apart from nearly all other states

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Critics of the Legislature’s productivity ignore a key legal distinction setting Mass. apart from nearly all other states

September 6, 2026

By James DiTullio

Even-numbered years are always memorable on Beacon Hill, with a flurry of activity to get bills over the legislative finish line. As I write this, conference committees are working to deliver major bills to the governor’s desk before the end of the 2025-26 legislative session.

As attention turns to the big pieces of legislation awaiting final action, an accompanying narrative invariably gets a good airing: Massachusetts has the least productive legislature in the country, with lawmakers who pass few bills across the state’s two-year legislative session.

It is easy to see how that storyline can spark the ire of voters and the scorn of opinion writers. But it is a fundamentally flawed reading of legislative productivity for reasons that are virtually never acknowledged amid the easy targeting of lawmakers.

As counsel to the Massachusetts Senate, I’m constantly reminded of the flaw in those attacks by reflecting on my experience at the end of a legislative session in a very different state. More than 20 years ago, during my third year of law school at the University of Virginia, I was a legal fellow in the Virginia governor’s office. On the final days of the Virginia legislative session in Richmond, I marveled at the stacks and stacks of approved bills that were delivered to the governor’s desk. The volume of bills was rather breathtaking, but the scope of each bill was sometimes painfully narrow.

That’s because Virginia is one of 43 states that have constitutions that limit all or most legislation to a single subject, a limitation known as the “single subject” rule.

The situation in Massachusetts is markedly different. The Bay State is one of only seven states—along with Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and North Carolina—that have no such limitations. Similar to Congress, which has no single-subject limitations, the Massachusetts Legislature is allowed to pass a bill touching as many topics as it wants. There are no single-subject limitations in the Commonwealth’s constitution, statutes, or legislative rules.

It’s precisely because of that distinction between Massachusetts and most other states that I bristle at the disingenuous but persistent claim that Massachusetts has the least productive, least effective state legislature in the country.