Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins will be returning to her Irish roots this September as she takes to the stage at the annual Kennedy Summer School on Saturday, September 7th.
Rachael will take to the stage and discuss her extensive career and current position as Suffolk County’s District Attorney in a public interview with Dr Robert M. Mauro of Boston College. She will offer her perspective on law and politics in today’s USA and her determination as the DA of Suffolk County to change and improve the criminal justice system; the interview will be followed by a panel discussion on US Politics and Election 2020, the panel includes Rachael Rollins, Cal Thomas, Sarah Elliott, Niall O’Dowd, Michael Lonergan and will be chaired by Larry Donnelly.
In November 2018 Rachael Rollins was elected Suffolk County’s District Attorney on a promise to end cash bail, send drug users to treatment instead of jail, and stop prosecuting 15 low-level charges.
Rachael was born into a large, multi-cultural family, with Cork heritage on her father’s side. Her parents met shortly after the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. At the time, her father had just returned from Vietnam and was living with his family on Ethel Street in Roslindale. Her mother was a nursing student at Boston University. They married and settled on Harlem Street in Dorchester in 1969.
She graduated from high school in 1989 and was selected onto an Elite New England School Girls Lacrosse Team and won a National Championship and she received a lacrosse scholarship to attend the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Immediately after graduating in 1994, she went to Northeastern University School of Law. While there, she served as the first legal intern in the history of the National Basketball Players Association and interned with United States District Court Judge Robert E. Keeton. After graduating in 1997, she clerked for one year on the Massachusetts Appeals Court and then went to Georgetown University Law Center where she obtained a Masters in Law.
She was accepted into and attended a 6-month intense Change Management and Leadership program at Harvard Business School. After she graduated from the program at HBS she was ready to take on the world. Tragically, she was then diagnosed with breast cancer. For the next 18+ months, she underwent treatment and multiple surgeries, which led to her becoming completely healthy and cancer free, but that diagnosis deeply impacted her and her family’s life.
The annual Kennedy Summer School is set to host a number of expert discussions and is billed as ‘A Festival of Irish and American, History, Politics and Culture’. There will be over 50 guest speakers participating over three days on a wide range of different subjects and organisers say that Brexit and Ireland’s relationship with the U.S. will feature prominently.
There will be a series of public interviews including an audience with distinguished New York Times columnist, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and author of three New York Times bestsellers, Maureen Dowd, Former Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Seamus Mallon, Archbishop Eamon Martin, former Congressman and classmate of Bill and Hillary Clinton Bruce Morrison, Micheál Martin TD, Stefanie Preissner, Dick Spring, Mick Wallace, Joan Burton, Michael McDowell and more Politicians, News correspondents, authors and leading global academics and many more will all partake in the 2019 Kennedy Summer School.
