After a career that included stints in both the public and private sectors and more than 25 years of service to BC Law, Legal Reasoning, Research, and Writing Professor Judy Tracy is retiring. Tracy trained and mentored generations of students through her work teaching some of the building blocks of 1L year: professional responsibility and LRR&W skills.
“Judy has been an inspiring teacher and colleague who has made invaluable contributions to the Law School,” said BC Law Professor Joan Blum. “Judy exemplifies in the highest degree the virtues of a lawyer in her professionalism, her integrity, and her intellectual power. She is beloved by her colleagues and her students for her compassion and practical wisdom. We will all miss her!”
Tracy has been teaching a variety of courses at Boston College Law School since 1991, including Introduction to Lawyering and Professional Responsibility, Advanced Legal Writing, and Legal Reasoning, Research & Writing. She was appointed Associate Professor of Legal Reasoning, Research & Writing in 1999, and received the Emil Slizewski Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001. Professor Tracy served as Coordinator of the LRR&W program (now known as Law Practice) from 2009 to 2011, and as co-Coordinator from 2013 to 2017.
Tracy received her BA in political science from the University of Michigan in 1968 and her JD from the University of Chicago in 1971. She was a litigation associate in a Chicago law firm and then served for ten years with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, first as the associate director of the Chicago office and then as the executive director of the Boston office.
She was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College from 1983-1985, where she studied the role of the courts in overseeing complex remedial decrees in law reform cases, and she designed a course in equitable remedies, which she taught at Northeastern University School of Law. From 1985 to 1991, Tracy was an assistant general counsel at the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, where she presided as a hearing officer in the administrative adjudication of disciplinary cases against physicians.
“Judy has been an integral part of our writing program for over twenty-five years,” said BC Law Dean Vincent Rougeau. “We are grateful for the many contributions she has made to our program and to our community, and wish her the best as she begins this next chapter in her life.”