The Boston University School of Law is the law school of Boston University, a private research university in Boston. Established in 1872, it is the third-oldest law school in New England, after Harvard Law School and Yale Law School. Approximately 630 students are enrolled in the full-time J.D. degree program and about 350 in the school's five LLM degree programs. BU Law was one of the first law schools in the country to admit students to study law regardless of race or gender.
Suffolk University Law School is the private, non-sectarian law school of Suffolk University located in downtown Boston, across the street from the Boston Common and the Freedom Trail, two blocks from the Massachusetts State House, and a short walk to the financial district. Suffolk Law was founded in 1906 by Gleason Archer Sr. to provide a legal education for those who traditionally lacked the opportunity to study law because of socio-economic or racial discrimination.
Daniel F. Conley is an American attorney and politician who served as the district attorney for Suffolk County, Massachusetts from 2002 to 2018. Appointed to the office in February 2002, Conley was later elected on November 5, 2002, and again in 2006, 2010, and 2014. He retired in 2018 to enter private practice.
Ruth Ida Abrams was the first female justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, where she served from 1978 to 2000, and the first female appellate justice in Massachusetts.
Sabita Singh is an American lawyer and Judge of the Massachusetts Appeals Court.
Macon Bolling Allen was an American attorney who is believed to be the first African American to become a lawyer and to argue before a jury, and the second to hold a judicial position in the United States. Allen passed the bar exam in Maine in 1844 and became a Massachusetts Justice of the Peace in 1847. He moved to South Carolina after the American Civil War to practice law and was elected as a judge in 1873 and again in 1876. Following the Reconstruction Era, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he continued practicing law.
Charles Russell Train was an American lawyer and politician who served two terms as a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts from 1859 to 1863.
The Boston University Police Department (BUPD) is the primary law-enforcement agency of Boston University and provides services to more than 41,000 students, faculty, and staff on 132 acres (0.53 km2) of University property and surrounding streets. Its headquarters are located at 32 Harry Agganis Way adjacent to Nickerson Field, in what was once the Braves Field ticket office.
George Lewis Ruffin was an American barber, attorney, politician, and judge. In 1869, he graduated from Harvard Law School, the first African American to do so. He was also the first African American elected to the Boston City Council. Ruffin was elected in 1870 to the Massachusetts Legislature. In 1883, he was appointed by the governor Benjamin Franklin Butler as a judge to the Municipal Court, Charlestown district in Boston, making him the first African American judge in the United States. He married 16 year-old Josephine St. Pierre in 1858. Florida Ruffin Ridley was one of their children.
Denise Jefferson Casper is an American attorney serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She used to be the Deputy District Attorney for the Middlesex District Attorney's Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Casper is the first black female judge to serve on the federal bench in Massachusetts. Casper is also notable for presiding over the criminal trial of Whitey Bulger.
The Boston Municipal Court (BMC), officially the Boston Municipal Court Department of the Trial Court, is a department of the Trial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States. The court hears criminal, civil, mental health, restraining orders, and other types of cases. The court also has an appellate division which reviews questions of law that arise from civil matters filed in the eight divisions of the department.
The Massachusetts Superior Court is a trial court department in Massachusetts.
David A. Lowy is an American attorney, academic and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 2016 to 2024. In February 2024 Lowy was named general counsel for the University of Massachusetts.
Judith Nelson Dilday is an American lawyer and the first person of color appointed as a judge of the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court.
Charlotte Anne Perretta was the first woman to sit on the Massachusetts Appeals Court.
Allan van Gestel is a retired American judge, who served as an associate justice of the Superior Court of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, located in Boston. He was that court’s first specialist business court judge, and has been described as the father of its Business Litigation Session.
