Mark L. Wolf

This biographical article is written encyclopedic . (February 2022)

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.

In 1985, Wolf was nominated to the U.S. District Court by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and took office. In 2006, he became Chief Judge of the Court of Massachusetts and served in the position until 2013.^[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.

Early life and career

Mark Wolf was born in

From 1981 to 1985, Judge Wolf was Deputy United States Attorney and Chief of the Public Corruption Unit in the District of Massachusetts.[2] In the first three years, Wolf's unit achieved more than 40 consecutive convictions, which included corrupt officials close to Boston Mayor Kevin White.^[3] In 1984, he received the Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award for exceptional success in prosecuting public corruption.

In 1985, Mark Wolf was appointed to serve as

Noteworthy rulings[5]

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

From 1901 until 1947, the city of Boston, Massachusetts, sponsored public celebrations of

Judge Wolf's judicial work exposed corruption in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's handling of matters involving notorious criminals James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen Flemmi. In 1998, Wolf ordered the FBI to divulge that Bulger and Flemmi were top echelon FBI informants. Following nine 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; it told Bulger and Flemmi of informants against them who were, as a result, killed; and it told Bulger and Flemmi that they were about to be charged so they could flee, which Bulger did.^[8] 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, except Bulger who was a fugitive, 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, convicted, and sentenced to serve life in prison, where he was murdered. In an editorial, The New York Times credited "Judge Wolf's courage and persistence" in the case.^[9] 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,

In 2007, Judge Wolf ruled that religiously motivated parents do not have a constitutional right to exempt their elementary school children from teaching on homosexuality and same-sex marriage, finding that there was no evidence of extreme indoctrination that might constitute a form of coercion.[12] In his opinion he wrote 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 others… [and] makes homosexual students feel more comfortable."

United States v. DiMasi (2011)

In 2009, Salvatore DiMasi, the former speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and three others were charged with conspiracy, honest services fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Federal prosecutors later added an extortion charge against DiMasi.  DiMasi was convicted after a seven-week trial. Wolf sentenced him to serve eight years in prison for extortion and honest services fraud.^[13] At the time, Wolf said he hoped that DiMasi's sentence would put a stop to Beacon Hill, Boston’s "culture of arrogance."^[14]

Kosilek v. O'Brien (2012)

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] Some were detained after interviews, at which they demonstrated that they were truly married. Wolf rejected the government's argument that the case should be dismissed, repeatedly finding that ICE was illegally detaining the aliens pending resolution of their immigration case.^[21]

Integrity Initiatives International

In 2016, Judge Wolf, Justice Richard Goldstone, and colleagues 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 in articles for the Brookings Institution and The Washington Post in 2014.^[24][25] The IACC proposal was further developed in a paper Wolf published in 2018 in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, titled “The World Needs an International Anti-Corruption Court.”^[26] In 2022, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published a paper by Wolf, Goldstone and Professor Robert Rotberg, titled “The Progressing Proposal for An International Anti-Corruption Court.”^[27]

In May 2022, nearly 300 world leaders, including more than 30 Nobel laureates, more than 40 former presidents and prime ministers, from over 80 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. 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.

In addition to the IACC, Wolf and III have supported national anti-corruption efforts, such as the High Anti-Corruption Court in Ukraine, for which Wolf has provided expert recommendations and mentored Ukrainian judges.

Outside activities

Judge Wolf has been: a Non-Resident Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught a seminar on Combatting Corruption Internationally; a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics; and a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is 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.^{[citation needed]}

Wolf is also Chairman Emeritus of the John William Ward Public Service Fellowship, Chairman Emeritus of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, and former Chair of the Judge David S. Nelson Fellowship.^[32][33]

References