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 assumed senior status on April 1, 2014.[4] She received a hearing before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary on September 17, 2014.[5] On November 20, 2014, her nomination was reported out of committee by voice vote.[6] On December 13, 2014, Senate Majority LeaderHarry Reid filed a motion to invoke cloture on the nomination. On December 16, 2014, Reid withdrew his cloture motion on Burroughs' nomination, and the Senate proceeded to confirm Burroughs by a voice vote. She received her federal judicial commission on December 19, 2014,[3] and was sworn in on January 7, 2015.[7]
Notable cases
Burroughs is most notable for her order putting a hold on President Donald Trump's travel ban in January 2017 (Executive Order 13769), and as the judge who presided over United States v. Salemme, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University, and United States v. Babich. Salemme was the last major trial of La Cosa Nostra mobsters. Francis Salemme (aka "Cadillac Frank") and co-defendant Paul Weadick were convicted of the murder of 43-year-old Steven A. DiSarro, who disappeared in May 1993. Salemme and Weadick were sentenced to life in prison in September 2018. In October 2018, Burroughs held a three-week bench trial in SFFA v. Harvard, a lawsuit challenging Harvard's admissions program as discriminatory against Asian Americans.[8] A decision in favor of the university was announced on October 1, 2019.[9]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 the drug. The indictments led to guilty pleas, including by former Insys CEO Michael Babich. The remaining defendants were tried from January through April 2019.[10] 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 United States on F-1 visas to depart the country if they would not be attending in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Judge Burroughs announced that the Trump administration had agreed to reverse the policy during a July 14, 2020 hearing in her Boston courtroom.[11]
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. Judge Burroughs stated during a December 2020 hearing that she viewed the lawsuit's requested relief of invalidating the votes of millions of Massachusetts resident as “too late,” “misplaced,” and “terribly unfair.” [12]
Burroughs has also presided over several class actions related to consumer products. In re Intuniv Antitrust Litigation concerned allegedly anticompetitive agreements between drug makers Shire and Actavis purportedly aimed at charging supracompetitive prices for an ADHD medication.[13] Judge Burroughs' class certification opinions in the matter (one opinion certifying a class of direct purchasers, and another declining to certify a class of indirect, consumer purchasers) are notable for their application of the predominance required for class certification where putative classes contain numerous uninjured members.[14]
In class actions against Nestlé, The Hershey Company, and Mars Inc., Burroughs considered allegations that the companies violated Massachusetts product labeling laws by failing to disclose the use of slave child labour in cocoa production. Judge Burroughs dismissed the complaints against the chocolate bar companies in January 2019,[15] a decision upheld by the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in June 2020.[16][17] In September 2019, Burroughs also dismissed a class action suit that claimed the packaging of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal was misleading given the cereal's limited honey content.[18]
In a February 2020 decision, Burroughs ordered the release of certain grand jury materials related to the Pentagon Papers.[19]
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