Harvard Case Judge Is Obama Appointee Who Oversaw Race Bias Suit

The judge overseeing Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over threats to slash funding has a track record of ruling in favor of the Ivy League school.

That background makes US District Judge Allison Burroughs a prime candidate to join other members of the judiciary who have drawn Donald Trump’s ire after she was assigned to the lawsuit Monday. She was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama in 2014 after a career as a federal prosecutor and private lawyer.

The Trump administration hasn’t commented on Burroughs, but the president has frequently attacked judges who he views as biased. He called for US District Judge James Boasberg to be impeached in March after he ordered a temporary halt to some deportations. On Wednesday, he went after US District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, who is overseeing a suit by the law firm Perkins Coie over the Trump administration’s order targeting the firm.

In 2018, she heard a suit filed by Students for Fair Admissions — and backed by the Trump administration — that claimed the university penalized Asian-Americans in the admissions process. Burroughs ruled for Harvard the next year, but the Supreme Court in 2023 effectively overturned her decision and banned colleges from considering race in admissions.

She also oversaw a 2020 lawsuit brought by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against the first Trump administration over efforts to force all international students who were enrolled online in American universities to leave the country. The administration rescinded the policy before Burroughs ruled.

More recently, on April 16, Burroughs temporarily blocked the Trump administration from capping overhead and administrative costs for government-funded research at nine universities, including Princeton and MIT.

Harvard Memorial Church on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photographer: Simon Simard/Bloomberg

Burroughs, who was born in Boston, graduated from Middlebury College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She spent 16 years as a federal prosecutor, first in Philadelphia and then in Boston, handling organized crime, economic crimes, computer hacking and money laundering. She then worked in private practice for nearly a decade before becoming a judge.

In elementary or middle school, she recalls handing out leaflets for future Democratic congressman Barney Frank when he was running for the Massachusetts statehouse, according to a disclosure filed as part of her Senate confirmation hearings. She also volunteered or worked for left-leaning politicians including Elizabeth Warren in the years before she became a judge.

A White House representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Burroughs. Voicemail and email messages left for Burroughs with her courtroom clerk and with the clerk of the federal courthouse in Boston weren’t immediately returned.

In one of her most well-known decisions, during Trump’s first administration, Burroughs halted his travel ban for people arriving from certain Muslim-majority countries for seven days in 2017, turning Boston’s Logan International Airport into a sanctuary for the travelers.

The case filed by Harvard on Monday over federal funding claims US agencies illegally froze $2.2 billion in grants to punish the school for refusing to abide by demands it overhaul governance, discipline and hiring policies in the wake of campus demonstrations. The administration has accused Harvard of allowing antisemitism on campus and failing to protect Jewish students. Harvard, the oldest and richest US university, argues the government is improperly withholding funding as leverage to gain control of academic decision making.

In the admissions case, Burroughs presided over the three-week bench trial and found Harvard didn’t discriminate against Asian-Americans and its consideration of race as one criterion among many in admissions decisions was lawful. The suit alleged that Harvard illicitly engaged in “racial balancing” by artificially limiting Asian-Americans’ numbers and favoring Black, Latino and White applicants.

On the bench, Burroughs has a no-nonsense style and frequently asks piercing questions. During the Harvard admissions trial, she interrupted the university’s longtime dean of admissions to suddenly ask why there hadn’t been any testimony from the students who the plaintiffs argued were victims of discrimination. A lawyer for the Students for Fair Admissions didn’t give an immediate answer and never produced one for the trial.

After the trial, Burroughs was involved in a controversy over whether the public had a right to see a tasteless racial joke that a Department of Education official at the Office of Civil Rights emailed to Harvard’s dean of admissions. Burroughs sealed transcripts of closed proceedings in which the two sides discussed the joke.

A Harvard Law School professor, Jeannie Suk Gersen, wrote a 2023 story in the New Yorker about her efforts to persuade the judge to unseal materials about the joke, which she described as a parody by the federal official of Harvard’s attitude toward Asian-Americans.

“In this case, sealed sidebars and court hearings obscured private understandings between officials from Harvard and the federal government, who shared a joke about racial stereotyping, and between judge and litigants, who agreed to keep hidden a discussion of alleged judicial bias,” Gersen wrote.

While Burroughs said that the material was “intended to embarrass” the dean, Gersen argued that it was nonetheless relevant to whether Harvard was biased.

In 2022, Burroughs oversaw a three-week trial over whether Eli Lilly & Co. infringed patents held by Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. involving Teva’s migraine treatment, Ajovy. Jurors ruled in Teva’s favor and awarded $176.5 million in damages. The judge later overturned that verdict. An appeals court is now weighing the case.

Attorney Douglas Kline, who represented Teva, said Burroughs was “very thoughtful, very careful,” during the trial.

“She wants to give the parties the time they feel they need to present the case that they want to present,” Kline said.“I obviously didn’t agree with her ruling on the post-trial motions, and that’s on appeal now. But as far as her approach to the trial, the way she dealt with the lawyers, she just was always very cordial, very professional, eager to let people have their day in court.”

Kline said she had “a very comfortable style.”

“Many judges run their courtroom in a way that seems designed to intimidate,” he said. “She was not at all like that. She seemed to want people to feel comfortable in her courtroom and to tamp down as much as possible the rhetoric and the fighting.”

(An AI summary previously at the top of the story was removed because it incorrectly stated the year of a judicial action.)

To contact the reporters on this story:
David Voreacos in New York at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net;
Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

Brendan Walsh

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