President Trump is not happy with U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, who is considering two cases involving Harvard University and the Trump administration.
Shortly after Burroughs presided over a July hearing for Harvard’s lawsuit over federal funding cuts, the president took to Truth Social and called her a “Trump-hating Judge,” adding that she’s “a TOTAL DISASTER.”
Who is this Massachusetts judge who’s drawing so much ire from the White House? NPR spoke with people who know her personally and professionally.
“She is very self-assured, and she is smart,” said Lisa Carter, who knows Burroughs through the latter’s work with a summer camp for underserved youth.
“She’s enormously self-confident in her skin,” said retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, who was on Burroughs’ selection committee.
“What you see is what you get. You know, no BS,” said Chris Swistro, who worked with Burroughs at Womenade Boston, a now-shuttered nonprofit that funded organizations supporting women and girls.
Burroughs declined to be interviewed for this story. Her clerk said the judge didn’t “think it would be possible or prudent, given the two Harvard cases that are still pending.”
The legal experts NPR reached out to were also cautious. Several conservative legal voices, including at the Federalist Society, declined to participate.
Decades of legal experience
Burroughs is 64 years old and has family roots that trace back to Russia. Burroughs’ grandfather moved to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century to escape anti-Jewish violence in the town of Kashoffka, a journey he detailed in a 1930 memoir. He went on to become a lawyer and philanthropist in the Boston area, a path Burroughs herself followed.
The documents from Burroughs’ Senate confirmation show her legal career began nearly 40 years ago. In 1988, she worked as a clerk for U.S. District Judge Norma Shapiro. In 1989, she moved to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, where she prosecuted organized crime cases.
In 1995, Burroughs returned to Massachusetts to work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office there. And in 2005, Burroughs made the leap to criminal defense, spending about 10 years working for the firm Nutter McClennen & Fish in Boston.
Appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama
Burroughs’ nomination to the federal bench came in 2014.
In an article for the Boston Bar Association, Burroughs recalled her surprise when she got a call from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts saying she was on a short list of candidates to fill judicial vacancies.
“Needless to say, I returned the call very promptly,” wrote Burroughs. “I have kept that voice mail — truly one of those calls you don’t really ever expect and certainly don’t forget.”
Gertner, who was on her selection committee, remembers Burroughs stood out because of her extensive time in the courtroom as both a federal prosecutor and a defense attorney.
“She knows the system inside and out,” Gertner told NPR. “Being a District Court judge is not an abstraction to her.”
Burroughs herself has described her passion for the bench. During her 2014 confirmation hearing, she told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that she loves “everything about the courtroom.”
“I love the human drama in there,” she said. “Our system of justice is just amazing.”
Big cases have come through her courtroom
Burroughs has witnessed her fair share of drama since joining the federal bench in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, from a major trial involving the Mafia in New England to a lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after he relocated a group of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. She also issued a temporary restraining order on President Trump’s 2017 ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries.
And Burroughs has a lot of experience presiding over cases involving Harvard. One of the most notable was Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, in which the plaintiff accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian American and white applicants. Burroughs was the first judge to issue a ruling on the case, and she found that Harvard did not intentionally discriminate against Asian American applicants. Her decision would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court, effectively ending race-conscious policies in college admissions.
Another Harvard case made it into her docket in 2020, when the first Trump administration tried to bar international students from the U.S. if their colleges remained online-only during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And today, Burroughs is presiding over two significant Harvard cases challenging Trump’s attempts to cut federal funding from the university and to ban the school from enrolling international students.
What she’s like in the courtroom
Court transcripts of pretrial conferences for cases involving Harvard show Burroughs is open about the fact that she wasn’t accepted into Harvard’s undergraduate program. Occasionally, she’ll even joke about it.
“I don’t know if I should be starting to feel better or worse about the fact that I didn’t get into Harvard,” said Burroughs in a 2016 pretrial hearing after it was mentioned that Harvard judges applicants on 1,600 fields of information.
In fact, she’s often lighthearted in court, regularly starting proceedings with language like “all right, gang.” During the July hearing for Harvard’s federal funding case, Burroughs joked about the fact that several of Harvard’s lawyers were present in court while, on the other side, there was just one attorney representing the federal government.
“It’s lonely over there, huh?” said Burroughs during the hearing.
Former colleagues say they’re familiar with Burroughs’ quick wit and sense of humor.
But they’re also quick to point out that Burroughs doesn’t mince words when trying to make tough decisions.
“She can really cut to the chase, and she had the ability to take a lot of perspectives into account and distill them into our strategic plan going forward,” said Chris Swistro, who used to work with Burroughs on the board of Womenade Boston.
Swistro said Burroughs helped the organization make important financial decisions, and she can see how the same quality would be useful in court.
“Irrespective of where your heartstrings may be pulled, facts matter, information matters, and we’re going to do our best work if we let those drive our decision-making,” said Swistro, describing Burroughs’ philosophy.
What’s next for the pending Harvard cases
The Trump administration has said it froze Harvard’s federal research funding because the university allegedly violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to address antisemitism on campus.
During the July hearing in that case, Burroughs called the federal government’s arguments “mind-boggling.” She asked the administration’s attorney direct questions about what combating antisemitism on campus has to do with funds for cancer research.
“You’re not taking away grants from labs that could have been antisemitic, but just cut off funding in a way one could argue hurts Americans and Jews,” she said in court.
During that hearing, Burroughs also highlighted the fact that she is Jewish and understands the importance of fighting antisemitism.
NPR reached out to some of the federal agencies named in the two Harvard lawsuits. The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment about the federal funding lawsuit. In a statement from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security regarding the international student ban case, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said, “We have the law, the facts, and common sense on our side.”
Trump has also said on Truth Social that he expects Burroughs to rule against the federal government but that “we will IMMEDIATELY appeal, and WIN.”
More recently, in late July, Trump said his administration was negotiating a possible settlement with Harvard.
Burroughs’ decisions on the two Harvard lawsuits are expected in the next few months.
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