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In Memoriam: Juan R. Torruella LL.M. ’84, Trailblazing Appellate Court Judge
Juan R. Torruella LL.M. ’84, the first Hispanic judge to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and first Puerto Rican to serve on a federal appeals court, died Oct. 26 in his native San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was 87.
Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, Torruella was the only Puerto Rican to serve on the First Circuit, which covers Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, as well as Puerto Rico. In 1994, he replaced new U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer as chief judge of the circuit, serving in that role until 2001.
“Judge Torruella was a wise decision maker, a brilliant scholar and a passionate participant in the pursuit of justice,” First Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey R. Howard said in a statement. “As a judge, his judicial legacy in the First Circuit and Puerto Rico will remain unsurpassed.”
In July, Torruella was part of a three-judge panel that unanimously threw out the death penalty imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the convicted Boston Marathon bomber. In 2012, he joined a unanimous decision that vacated a section of the Defense of Marriage Act, a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court.
In his book “The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal,” Torruella argued that “colonial rule and the indignities of second-class citizenship” could be eliminated “by securing for Puerto Rico equality under American law,” such as statehood.
“There really must be a balance, one that can only be achieved by our having political equality, and right now there is none,” he told Bostonia magazine in 2019. “What we need and ask for, is equality as U.S. citizens. I believe that is what we have a right to have under the Constitution.”
Torruella was also an Olympic sailor, representing Puerto Rico in the Summer Olympics in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976.
Torruella received a bachelor’s from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his J.D. from Boston University School of Law. He later earned a master’s in public administration from the University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Administration and a master’s from Magdalen College, Oxford.
—Mike Fox
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Alumni Elected to American Law Institute
Daniel A. Bress ’05, Cathy Lesser Mansfield ’87, Jacob H. Rooksby ’07 and Cate Stetson ’94 were elected to the American Law Institute.
Bress serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2019. He was previously a partner with Kirkland & Ellis, where his practice focused on complex trial and appellate litigation, including class actions and large government fraud cases. Bress has also been an adjunct professor at UVA Law and at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, where he has taught seminars in constitutional and statutory interpretation. Prior to joining Kirkland & Ellis, Bress worked in the San Francisco office of Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Mansfield joined the Case Western Reserve Law School faculty in 2019 as executive director of the Master of Arts in Financial Integrity Program and senior instructor in law. She teaches a variety of consumer, payments and commercial law courses, is a co-author of the National Consumer Law Center’s Consumer Banking and Payments Law manual, and speaks nationally about consumer protection issues. She is also a distinguished fellow at The Consortium for the Research and Study of Holocaust and the Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for National Security and Human Rights Law.
Rooksby was named dean of the Gonzaga University School of Law in 2018 and holds a joint appointment as a tenured professor of law and professor of leadership studies. Prior to joining Gonzaga, Rooksby was an associate professor and associate dean at Duquesne University School of Law. He is author of “The Branding of the American Mind: How Universities Capture, Manage, and Monetize Intellectual Property and Why It Matters” and co-author of the sixth edition of “The Law of Higher Education,” the leading treatise in the field. Rooksby also earned an M.Ed. and Ph.D. from UVA.
Stetson is co-director of Hogan Lovells’ appellate practice group and an elected member of the firm’s global board. She has argued more than 100 appeals and dozens of trial-court matters, including multiple arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, in all but one of the 13 federal circuits, in state appellate courts, and in District Courts spanning the country. Stetson welcomed the UVA Law Class of 2022 as orientation speaker in 2019.
—Mike Fox