Judge Allison Burroughs Will Oversee Harvard’s Federal Funding Lawsuit. It’s Not Her First Harvard Assignment.

Massachusetts District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs, a Barack Obama appointee who ruled to uphold Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies in 2019, will oversee the lawsuit Harvard brought on Monday against the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze.

Burroughs was appointed by Obama in 2014 — and during her decade as a U.S. district court judge, she has repeatedly overseen high-profile litigation involving Harvard.

She oversaw a case brought against the first Trump administration by Harvard and MIT over the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s attempt in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, to force all international students who were enrolled online in U.S. universities to leave the country. ICE eventually walked back its policy without a ruling from Burroughs, allowing international students to study online in the U.S.

In 2019, when Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard, claiming that its admissions practices were discriminatory to Asian Americans, Burroughs upheld Harvard’s admissions policy. SFFA appealed the case, and it eventually reached the Supreme Court — which overruled Burroughs in 2023, declaring affirmative action in higher education admissions unconstitutional.

During the SFFA trial, Burroughs garnered notice for not unsealing sidebar discussions that contained a joke that included anti-Asian remarks. She chose not to compel Harvard to hand over information on its history of discriminatory admissions practices against Jewish applicants in the case, arguing that 1950s-era records would not be relevant to the plaintiffs’ claims.

Burroughs was assigned to Monday’s suit after Harvard’s attorneys submitted a filing arguing that it was related to an earlier lawsuit brought by Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors and currently pending before Burroughs. The filing asked that the new lawsuit be assigned to the same judge.

The AAUP chapter sued Harvard in early April to block the Trump administration’s review of Harvard’s federal funding, arguing that its proposed conditions were unconstitutional.

Burroughs has previously been sympathetic to plaintiffs who argued that other attempts by the Trump administration to cut research funding were illegal on procedural grounds.

On April 16, she temporarily blocked the U.S. Department of Energy from cutting more than $400 million in annual spending in federal funding to universities after the Association of American Universities — of which Harvard is a member — led a lawsuit against the proposed cuts.

The proposal attempted to sharply limit the maximum rate at which the DOE can reimburse universities for indirect costs —research-related expenses that are not tied to a specific project or lab.

Burroughs is expected to call the case’s counsel to an in-person hearing April 28, during which she will decide whether or not to issue a longer-term freeze on the DOE’s funding slash.

Before Burroughs’ appointment as a federal judge, she worked as a federal prosecutor focused on economic crimes in Boston and also spent time in private practice. She graduated from Middlebury College in 1983 and attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania.

–Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at abigail.gerstein@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.