Roderick Ireland

Now in his 49th year teaching at the SCCJ and its predecessor, the College of Criminal Justice, Roderick L. Ireland is a graduate of Lincoln University, (the first HBCU in the United States), Columbia Law School (J.D.), Harvard Law School (LL.M), and Northeastern University, Ph.D. in Law, Policy and Society.

He began his legal career in 1969 as a Neighborhood Legal Services attorney. In 1971 he founded, along with attorney Wallace Sherwood (who later taught at the SCCJ for 35 years), the Roxbury Defenders Committee, a public defender program that provided free legal services in criminal cases. While there, he participated in three landmark cases that significantly changed Massachusetts’ criminal law and procedure: Commonwealth v. Britt (a 1972 case that led to the use of tape recording in all courts across the state; and Myers v. Commonwealth and Corey v. Commonwealth (both 1973 cases) that changed the standards in probable cause hearings in criminal cases.

In 1975 he was appointed the Assistant Secretary and Chief Legal Counsel for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance, and in 1977, the Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Appeals on Motor Vehicle Liability Policies and Bonds. He then served as a judge for 37 years, sitting in the Boston Juvenile Court from 1977 to 1990, the Massachusetts Appeals Court from 1990 to 1997, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1997 to 2014. When he was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 1997, he became the first African-American to sit on that bench in its over three hundred year history. In 2010 he became the Court’s first African-American chief justice.

While sitting as a judge full-time, Ireland also served as an adjunct faculty member in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (formerly the College of Criminal Justice) from 1978 to 2014. He also taught at Harvard Law School, Boston University Law School, Northeastern University School of Law (1979-2004), the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and New York University Law School’s Appellate Judges Seminar (2001 to 2016). He is the author of a two volume treatise on Massachusetts Juvenile Law published by Thomson/Reuters in its Massachusetts Practice Series (the first edition was published in 1993 and the second edition in 2006), as well as several law review articles.

As one of the four justices who voted in favor of same-sex marriage in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003), the nation’s very first case in which a state supreme court declared same-sex marriage constitutional, he has lectured and spoken on that topic a number of times, including giving the Sixteenth Annual Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Lecture on State Courts and Social Justice at New York University School of Law entitled, “In Goodridge’s Wake: Reflections on the Political, Public and Personal Repercussions of the Massachusetts Same-Sex Marriage Cases.”

His interests include criminal law, juvenile law, and constitutional law. Of particular interest, given his experience as chief justice of the SJC, is studying both the theory and the reality of how government works, with a focus on the interplay of the judiciary with the legislative and executive branches, as well as with external entities such as the business community and the media. He is also very interested in diversifying the judiciary at all levels through increased training programs, as well as scholarship and fellowship opportunities for minorities, and works closely with the Justice George Lewis Ruffin Society, an organization sponsored by Northeastern’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, to support and uplift minority professionals in the criminal justice system and the legal profession in general.

In 2017, Chief Justice Ireland was asked by the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Robert DeLeo, to advise the Legislature on issues related to Criminal Justice Reform. In 2018, he was asked by the Cambridge Police Department to review their arrest policies and procedures in a highly controversial case. In 2020, he was retained by the City of Springfield, Massachusetts to be Special Advisor on police reform, including reviewing the police department’s policy, training and accountability systems. In 2021 he was asked by the parties to be the claims adjudicator in a multi million dollar class action settlement due to racial discrimination by the city of Brockton. In 2023 and 2024 Chief Justice Ireland was an expert witness on Massachusetts law in a multi-billion dollar series of patent infringement cases between Moderna and Pfizer, (two premier international biopharmaceutical and biotechnological corporations), in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the U.K. related to the production of Covid 19 vaccines during the pandemic.

There are three organizations that Chief Justice Ireland helped create that he is especially proud of. They are 1) The Roxbury Defenders Committee, a public defender program he founded in 1971 (with attorney Wallace Sherwood, who later taught at the SCCJ for 35 vears) that is still in operation and highly regarded in the legal community; 2) The Judge Ireland Children’s Fund, created in his honor in 1990 (when he moved from the Boston Juvenile Court to the Massachusetts Appeals Court) and still in operation, that is dedicated to providing support and help to children and families in greater Boston who are the subjects of abuse and neglect; and 3) The Judicial Youth Corps, a program he helped create at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1990, and still in operation, that gives high school students summer jobs working in various courts in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, with the goal of exposing them to the legal field and expanding their knowledge about the legal system. Many of the alumni are now lawyers, judges, teachers, chefs, pharmacists, administrators, etc.

In 2015, the City of Springfield, Massachusetts renamed the street he grew up on (Terrence Street) to “Chief Justice Roderick L. Ireland Way,” and in 2017 the Massachusetts Legislature renamed the Hampden County Hall of Justice “The Roderick L. Ireland Courthouse.