Mark L. Wolf

The Honorable Mark Lawrence Wolf
Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Incumbent
Assumed office January 1, 2013
Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts
In office 2006–2012
Preceded by	William G. Young
Succeeded by	Patti B. Saris
Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts
In office April 4, 1985 – January 1, 2013
Appointed by	Ronald Reagan
Succeeded by	Indira Talwani
Personal details
Born	Mark Lawrence Wolf (1946-11-23) November 23, 1946 (age 74) Boston, Massachusetts
Education	Yale University (B.A.) Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Committees	Judicial Conference of the United States

Mark Lawrence Wolf (born November 23, 1946) is a Senior Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and founder and chair of Integrity Initiatives International. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches a seminar on Combating Corruption Internationally. Judge Wolf writes and speaks regularly on a range of human rights issues and legal topics.

Wolf was nominated to the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts by Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on April 3, 1985, and received his commission the following day. In 2006, he was appointed Chief Judge of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts and served in the position until 2012.^[1] He was also a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States, having previously served on its committees on Criminal Law, the Rules of Criminal Procedure, and Codes of Conduct. On January 1, 2013, Wolf took senior status. As a Senior Judge, Wolf continues to preside over a range of criminal and civil cases.

In 2016, Wolf and Judge Richard Goldstone, former Justice on the Supreme Court of South Africa and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, formed Integrity Initiatives International ("III", pronounced "Triple I"). III is a Boston-based non-governmental organization and international anti-corruption advocacy group, which aims to establish an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC) and to promote other measures to strengthen the enforcement of criminal laws against kleptocrats.^[2] Wolf first proposed an IACC at the 2012 St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, the 2014 World Forum on Global Governance, and in articles for the Brookings Institution and The Washington Post in 2014.^[3][4]

Early life and early career[]

Mark Wolf was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Yale University from 1965 to 1968, before entering Harvard Law School and receiving his Juris Doctor in 1971. He served in the United States Army Reserve from 1969 to 1975 and achieved the rank of specialist five (E-5).

Prior to his appointment as Judge in 1985, Wolf served in the United States Department of Justice as Special Assistant to United States Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman and as Special Assistant to United States Attorney General Edward Levi after the Watergate scandal. During his time at the Department of Justice, he received a Certificate of Appreciation from President Gerald Ford for his service in the resettlement of Indochinese refugees fleeing the Vietnam War. Wolf also worked in private practice in Washington D.C. with Surrey, Karasik & Morse and in Boston with Sullivan & Worcester.

From 1981 to 1985, Judge Wolf was Deputy to United States Attorney Bill Weld, and Chief of the Public Corruption Unit in Boston.^[5] In the first three years, Wolf's unit achieved 40 consecutive convictions, which included corrupt officials close to Boston Mayor Kevin White (politician).^[6] In 1984, he received the Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award for exceptional success in prosecuting public corruption in Massachusetts.

Judicial Career and Noteworthy Rulings^[7][]

The John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse as seen from Boston Harbor.

In 1985, Mark Wolf was appointed to serve as United States Federal Judge for the District of Massachusetts.

South Boston Allied War Veterans Council v. Boston (1995)

From 1901 until 1947, the city of Boston, Massachusetts, sponsored public celebrations of St. Patrick's Day and Evacuation Day, which marks the departure of British troops from the city in 1776. In 1947, Mayor James Michael Curley gave authority for organizing the parade over to the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, a group of unincorporated private citizens selected from a variety of Boston veterans' groups - the only group to apply for a permit until 1992. That year, the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB) requested that it be allowed to march in the parade alongside the usual participating groups. GLIB argued that it was not a group primarily aimed at conveying a "gay, lesbian, and bisexual message." In 1995, Judge Wolf ruled that the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council could restrict participation to those who endorsed that political stance as an exercise of the organizers' free speech under the First Amendment.^[8] He ordered the city of Boston to issue the parade permit, which it had been threatening to withhold, to South Boston Allied War Veterans Council. The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld Wolf's decision in a landmark judgement on free speech, specifically the rights of groups to determine what message their activities convey to the public. The Court ruled in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston that private organizations, even if they had permits for a public demonstration, are permitted to exclude groups if those groups presented a message contrary to the one the organizing group wanted to convey.^[9]

United States v. Salemme (1998) - 'The Whitey Bulger Case'

Judge Wolf's judicial work exposed public corruption in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's handling of matters involving Whitey Bulger, Frank Salemme, and Stephen Flemmi. In 1998, Wolf required the FBI to divulge that Bulger and Flemmi were top echelon FBI informants. Following 9-months of hearings, Wolf issued a 661-page decision finding that the FBI had not investigated Bulger and Flemmi for serious crimes, including murder; it had warned Bulger and Flemmi when other federal agencies were investigating them so they could flee; and it had told Bulger and Flemmi of informants so they could be killed.^[10] Although Flemmi had not been granted immunity from FBI prosecution, Wolf decided that the information he had provided could not be used against him. The ruling was reversed by the Court of Appeals, but the defendants eventually pled guilty. Several years later, investigators found a grave in Boston with the bodies of three of Bulger's victims. Bulger was finally apprehended in 2011 and is now serving a life sentence. In an editorial, The New York Times credited "Judge Wolf's courage and persistence" in the case.^[11] Since then, the government has paid out more than $100 million in claims to the families of people murdered by informants shielded by the FBI, an FBI agent was later sentenced to 50 years in prison, and there were Congressional hearings into the FBI's use of murderers as informants.

Sampson v. United States (2003)

In July 2001, Gary Lee Sampson carjacked and murdered three people: Philip McCloskey (aged 69 of Taunton, Massachusetts), Jonathan Rizzo (aged 19 of Kingston, Massachusetts), and Robert Whitney (aged 58 of Concord, New Hampshire). The murders of McCloskey and Rizzo fell under the jurisdiction of the federal court system, and Sampson pleaded guilty. Wolf acknowledged that "Sampson's motion to dismiss present[ed] a serious question whether the Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA) is unconstitutional because of the mounting evidence that innocent individuals have been sentenced to death, and undoubtedly executed, more often than previously understood."^[12] Nonetheless, Wolf found that the facts of the Sampson case did not allow him to declare the FDPA unconstitutional. Quoting the poet W. H. Auden, he told Sampson, “You personify the wisdom of the poets… 'Evil is unspectacular and always human … And shares our bed and eats at our own table.'" He later added that “By committing horrific crimes that virtually compelled decent people in this community to condemn you to die, you have diminished, if not degraded, us all."^[1] After discovering that a juror had lied, Judge Wolf vacated Sampson's sentence and ordered a new trial.

Park v. Hurley (2007)

In 2007, Judge Wolf ruled that even if religiously motivated, parents do not have a constitutional right to exempt their elementary school kids from teaching on homosexuality and same-sex marriage, finding that there was no evidence of extreme indoctrination that might constitute a form of coercion.^[13] In his opinion he asserted that “public schools are entitled to teach anything that… helps students become engaged in democracy… reduces future discrimination… teaches young children to understand and respect… makes homosexual students feel more comfortable.”^[14]

United States v. DiMasi (2011)

On June 2, 2009, Salvatore DiMasi, the former speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and three others were indicted on charges that included conspiracy, honest services fraud, mail fraud, aiding and abetting, and wire fraud. Federal prosecutors later added a count of extortion to the charges against DiMasi. With the added charge, he faced a possible 185-year sentence if convicted on all counts in the indictment. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. After a seven-week trial, Wolf sentenced DiMasi to eight years in prison for extortion and honest services fraud.^[15] At the time, Wolf said he hoped that DiMasi’s sentence would put a stop to Beacon Hill, Boston’s “culture of arrogance.”^[16]

Kosilek v. O'Brien (2012)

In May 2006, Michelle Kosilek, a pre-operative transsexual who had been convicted of murdering her partner, sued the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, arguing that its refusal to provide sex reassignment surgery constituted "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In September 2012, Judge Wolf ordered that the Department of Corrections must provide Michelle Kosilek with sex reassignment surgery, which the DOC's medical personnel determined was medically necessary as a treatment for Kosilek's gender dysphoria. In 2006, the The Boston Globe had opposed Kosilek's surgery because "private insurers rarely pay for sex-change operations" and "hormone treatment and expert therapy" are "sufficient," but in 2012, The Boston Globe said that Wolf's decision made a persuasive case that the surgery was "medically necessary, not an elective procedure," however "distasteful."^[17][18] In his ruling, Wolf found that "Michelle Kosilek, who lives as a woman in a male prison facility, had experienced "intense mental anguish," and said there was a serious medical need" for her to have the procedure.^[19]

Calderon v. Nielsen (2018)

In 2018, five undocumented immigrants and their spouses filed a lawsuit against the US government alleging that they were unlawfully arrested and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).^[20] They were detained during their marriage interview, held by ICE in order to verify that their marriages to U.S. citizens were legitimate. Wolf rejected the government’s argument that the case should be dismissed, and held that ICE failed to provide the undocumented immigrants with due process: it did not give the undocumented immigrant written notice approximately 30 days in advance of ICE's custody review and did not review custody within 90 days of their detention.^[21]

Integrity Initiatives International[]

Wolf and Richard Goldstone formed Integrity Initiatives International in 2016.

Wolf speaks to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Russia Service, May 30, 2013.^[22]

In 2016, Judge Wolf and Justice Richard Goldstone formed Integrity Initiatives International (III) to combat grand corruption, also known as "kleptocracy." The mission of III is to "strengthen the enforcement of criminal laws in order to punish and deter leaders who are corrupt and regularly violate human rights, and to create opportunities for the democratic process to replace them with leaders dedicated to serving their citizens."^[23] In order to achieve this, III advocates for the creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC), a concept which Wolf first proposed at the 2012 St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, the 2014 World Forum on Global Governance, and in articles for the Brookings Institution and The Washington Post in 2014.^[24][25]

Wolf, Robert Rotberg, and Richard Goldstone meet with distinguished judges, attorneys, and academics to discuss the International Anti-Corruption Court at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 20, 2019.^[26]

Wolf's proposal quickly gained the support of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Transparency International, and Human Rights Watch. In 2018, Wolf informed the public of his idea in an article in the Daedalus (journal), titled "The World Needs an International Anti-Corruption Court."^[27] In late 2019, a joint declaration was issued by President Iván Duque Márquez of Colombia and (then) President Martín Vizcarra of Peru calling for further study and action to establish an IACC.^[28] In February 2020, Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-California) and Congressman Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) introduced a House Resolution calling on the U.S. Congress to support efforts to establish an IACC. In May 2020, Wolf discussed the IACC with the United Nations High-Level Panel on Financial Accountability, Transparency, and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda.

Wolf speaking at the Global Hemispheric Anti-Corruption Conference in Cali, Colombia in October 2019.^[29]

In June 2021, over 100 world leaders, including Nobel laureates, former presidents, high court justices, and prominent business people, from over 40 countries signed a Declaration in support of establishing the IACC.^[30] The proposed IACC would enforce existing national anti-corruption laws, or a new international counterpart to them, against kleptocrats and their conspirators.^[30] The IACC would be a court of last resort. Operating on the principle of complementarity, it would only prosecute if a member state were unwilling or unable to prosecute a case itself. Prosecution in the IACC would, in many cases, result in the incarceration of convicted kleptocrats and thus create the opportunity for the democratic process to replace them with honest leaders. The IACC would also have the potential to recover, repurpose, and repatriate stolen assets through sentences that include orders of restitution in criminal cases and judgments in civil cases brought by whistleblowers, a small portion of which would be used to fund the Court itself. The IACC would need 20 to 25 representative countries to be effective as long as they include some financial centers through which kleptocrats often launder the proceeds of corruption, and countries in which kleptocrats invest and spend their wealth.

Outside Activities[]

Teaching

Boston Latin School, where Wolf chairs the John William Ward (professor) Fellowship.

Judge Wolf is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches a seminar on Combatting Corruption Internationally. He is also a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He taught courses on the role of the judge in American democracy at Harvard Law School, Boston College Law School, New England Law Boston School, and the University of California-Irvine Law Schools.

Community Service

Judge Wolf is co-founder and chairman of the John William Ward (professor)^{[disambiguation needed]} Public Service Fellowship, which provides juniors and seniors at Boston Latin School with the opportunity to work for a summer in the office of an elected or appointed public servant in state government, municipal government, the judicial system. Judge Wolf administered the Ward Fellowship for more than 30 years, having awarded over 400 Boston Latin School with fellowships. In recognition of his service, he was awarded an honorary degree from the Boston Latin School in 1990.^[31]

Additionally, Judge Wolf is chairman emeritus and an active board member of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, which enables aspiring health professionals to engage in service projects in health centers and community agencies in cities across the United States and in the hospital in Gabon which Dr. Albert Schweitzer established in 1913. Since 2014, Judge Wolf has taught poetry to 4th graders at the Trotter Innovation Public School, with Harvard College students and alumni. Every year, the students are invited on a field trip to the Massachusetts Federal Courthouse, where they engage in further poetry writing and learn about the American legal system. At the unveiling of Wolf's portrait in 2010, many of the judge’s colleagues who spoke, including the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Wolf's former law clerk Scott Kafker who is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and the former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court, noted Wolf's affinity for poetry. Indeed, the Judge has said before in interviews that he often finds comfort in poetry when making critical decisions. He told The Boston Globe, "I think that poetry, to a certain extent, redresses the damage done in that process. It has a certain healing quality for me."^[32]

Wolf previously served as founder and chairman of the Judge David Sutherland Nelson Fellowship, which enables inner-city students from Boston Public Schools to intern in the Massachusetts Federal Courthouse during the summer.

References[]

Sources[]

• Mark Lawrence Wolf at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.