Allison Dale Burroughs

Early life

Allison Dale Burroughs was born in 1961 in Boston. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude from Middlebury College. She received a Juris Doctor cum laude in 1988 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She began her legal career as a law clerk for Judge Norma Levy Shapiro of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1988 to 1989. She served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1989 to 1995 and in the District of Massachusetts from 1995 to 2005. From 2005 to 2014, she was a partner at Nutter McClennen & Fish, where she represented individuals and corporations in criminal and civil proceedings primarily before federal courts.

Judge

On July 31, 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Burroughs to serve as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts to the seat vacated by Judge Rya W. Zobel, who had assumed senior status on April 1, 2014. She received a hearing before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary on September 17, 2014. On November 20, her nomination was reported out of committee by voice vote. On December 13, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed a motion to invoke cloture on the nomination. On December 16, Reid withdrew his cloture motion on Burroughs's nomination and the Senate confirmed Burroughs by voice vote. She received her federal judicial commission on December 19 and was sworn in on January 7, 2015.

Notable cases

Burroughs is most notable for her order that put a hold on President Donald Trump's travel ban in January 2017 (Executive Order 13769) and for presiding over United States v. Salemme, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and United States v. Babich.

Salemme was the last major trial of American Mafia members. In 2018, Francis Salemme (aka "Cadillac Frank") and co-defendant Paul Weadick were convicted of the murder of Steven A. DiSarro, who disappeared in 1993, and were sentenced to life in prison.

In October 2018, Burroughs held a three-week bench trial in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a lawsuit challenging Harvard's admissions program as discriminatory against Asian Americans. A decision in favor of the university was announced on October 1, 2019.

United States v. Babich is a criminal case brought against several former executives of the pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics. The government alleged that the executives violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 18 U.S.C. 1692 et seq., by engaging in a scheme to sell the fentanyl-based pain medication Subsys by bribing physicians to prescribe it. The indictments led to guilty pleas, including by former Insys CEO Michael Babich. The remaining defendants were tried from January through April 2019. All five remaining defendants, including former billionaire John Kapoor, were convicted of racketeering.

Burroughs also presided over a July 2020 lawsuit filed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that sought to halt an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy that required international students in the U.S. on F-1 visas to depart the country if they would not attend in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Burroughs announced that the Trump administration had agreed to reverse the policy during a July 14 hearing in her Boston courtroom.

In December 2020, Burroughs presided over a lawsuit brought by five Republicans who lost state and federal legislative races in Massachusetts and sought to overturn the election results. At a December 2020 hearing, she said the plaintiffs' requested relief of invalidating the votes of millions of Massachusetts residents was "too late", "misplaced", and "terribly unfair".