Carmen M. Ortiz, former US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, and Geraldine S. Hines, an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, have been named as Jerome Lyle Rappaport Visiting Professors at Boston College Law School for the fall and spring semesters, respectively.
Ortiz, who took on such high profile cases as those of Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and fugitive Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, will teach a seminar class on national security and participate in several panel discussions as part of the Rappaport Distinguished Public Policy Series. A seasoned prosecutor, Ortiz was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to be Massachusetts’ chief federal law enforcement officer, becoming the first woman and first Hispanic to hold the post. During her more than seven years in office, she oversaw 250 attorneys and staff, implemented the district’s first Civil Rights Unit, and served on the United States Attorney General’s Advisory Committee. Among the other complex criminal and civil cases she handled as US Attorney were numerous health care fraud investigations that resulted in significant financial settlements, among them health care giants GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson.
Justice Hines, who was BC Law’s 2017 Commencement speaker, will teach the seminar “Advanced Topics in Criminal Procedure: Race and Policing” and also lecture in the policy series. She grew up in the segregated South, a young witness to the 1960s upheavals over the struggle to dismantle the “Jim Crow” laws and customs that defined life for black people during that period. Her appointment to the SJC by Governor Deval Patrick in 2014—a first for a black woman in the 322 years since the establishment of the court—capped four decades of service to the causes she championed based on her experiences as a child of the Mississippi Delta. As a founding partner in the first law firm of women of color in New England, she litigated cases on discrimination in education, labor and family law matters, employment discrimination, and police misconduct claims. She began her judicial career in 2001 as an associate justice of the Superior Court, and was appointed to the Appeals Court by Governor Patrick in 2013 before her appointment to the SJC a year later.