MBA will honor Hon. Mark Wolf, Globe columnist Kevin
Cullen May 10
Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and the Massachusetts Bar
Association will honor the best of the legal profession at
Excellence in the Law on Thursday, May 10, from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at
the Fairmont Copley Plaza, 138 St James Ave., Boston.
The MBA will bestow the Daniel F. Toomey Excellence in the
Judiciary Award to the Hon. Mark Wolf, chief judge of the U.S.
District Court; and the Excellence in Legal Journalism Award to
Pulitzer-prize winning Boston Globe columnist Kevin
Cullen. The ceremony will also honor Diversity Heroes, Emerging
Legal Leaders, Excellence in Pro Bono, Marketing, Firm
Administration and Operations.
Wolf was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District
of Massachusetts in 1985 and became its chief judge in 2006. He is
also a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States,
having previously served on its committees on Criminal Law, the
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and Codes of Conduct.
Wolf also previously served in the Department of Justice as a
special assistant to the deputy attorney general of the United
States (1974) and the attorney general of the United States
(1975-77), and as deputy U.S. attorney for the District of
Massachusetts and chief of the Public Corruption unit in that
office (1981-85). He was also in private practice in Washington,
D.C., with Surrey, Karasik & Morse, and in Boston with Sullivan
& Worcester.
Wolf has taught courses on the role of the judge in American
democracy at the Harvard, Boston College and New England law
schools, and spoken on this subject and human rights issues in
Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and
China. Wolf is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law
School.
Cullen has written for The Boston Globe since 1985, and
served as a local, national and foreign correspondent before
becoming a columnist in 2007. His columns highlighting the suicide
of a 15-year-old girl who had been bullied by schoolmates helped
win the top award from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at
Columbia University in 2011.
Cullen had several stints on the Globe's Spotlight
Team, including the 1988 team that exposed the mobster James
"Whitey" Bulger as an FBI informant and the team that won the
Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 for exposing the cover-up
of sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests.
He spent more than 20 years covering the conflict in Northern
Ireland, more than any other American journalist, and in 1994, was
honored by the Overseas Press Club of America for his interpretive
reporting from Northern Ireland. In 1997, he was appointed as the
Globe's Dublin bureau chief, covering the peace process in
Northern Ireland full time.