Graduation season is here and Brooklyn Law School holds its 117th Commencement Ceremony today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House. The commencement speaker was Hon. Dora L. Irizarry, Chief United States District Judge, Eastern District of New York. Appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004, Dora L. Irizarry is the first Hispanic District Judge to serve in the Eastern District of New York. On April 23, 2016, she became the first Hispanic Chief Judge of the Eastern District of New York, and the first Hispanic woman Chief Judge within the Second Circuit. Born in Puerto Rico, and raised in the South Bronx, she attended public schools, and graduated cum laude with honors and distinction in the major of Political Sociology from Yale University in 1976. In 1979, she graduated from Columbia Law School, where she was a Charles Evans Hughes Fellow, and joined the Bronx District Attorney’s Office Appeals Bureau. Assigned to the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s Office, she investigated and prosecuted some of the City’s largest complex narcotics cases. She also served in the New York County District Attorney’s Office, the New York State Attorney General’s Organized Crime Task Force, and as a special prosecutor in the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Commencement speakers at other area law schools this year are:
New York
- Albany Law School – Hon. Michael J. Garcia, Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals
- Buffalo Law School – Terrence M. Connors of Connors LLP
- Cardozo School of Law — Hon. Patricia Millett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
- Columbia Law School — Jeh Johnson, Former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security
- CUNY School of Law — Paul Butler, former prosecutor and law professor of Georgetown University
- Fordham University School of Law —Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
- Hofstra School of Law — Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize investigative journalist
- New York Law School — Hon. Stephen Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court
- New York University School of Law — Bryan Stevenson, NYU Law Professor and Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director
- Pace University School of Law — Eric Gonzalez, Kings County District Attorney
- St. John’s University School of Law — Hon. Preet Bharara, Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York
- Syracuse University College of Law — Hon. Preet Bharara, Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York
- Touro Law Center — Hon. Joseph Crowley, U.S. Representative, 14th District of New York
- Rutgers University School of Law at Newark — Hon. Gurbir S. Grewal, New Jersey Attorney General
- Seton Hall Law School — Hon. Jovita Carranza, U.S. Treasurer
