Who is Joshua Levy, the acting US attorney for Massachusetts?
Levy #Levy
Joshua S. Levy, who on Friday was named acting US attorney in Massachusetts, has worked as both a federal prosecutor and a white collar defense lawyer for a major firm.
Levy specialized in white collar criminal matters and complex civil litigation at Ropes & Gray, the US attorney’s office said in a statement. His white collar defense work won him “Lawyer of the Year” honors for 2016 from Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.
He left Ropes & Gray in January 2022 after 17 years to become Rachael Rollins’s second-in-command.
With Rollins’s resignation last week amid an ethics scandal, Levy is now her successor.
This is his second stint in the US attorney’s office. From 1997 to 2004, he worked in the office’s economic crimes unit, prosecuting white-collar crimes, including health care fraud, securities and investor fraud, terrorism financing, and environmental crimes, the US attorney’s office said.
When he returned to the federal prosecutors’ office in 2022, Rollins lauded him as a “tireless and dedicated attorney” with “outstanding character, judgment and expertise,” and “excellent legal acumen.”
Levy was one of four finalists for the US attorney’s job, along with Rollins, the Globe reported in 2021.
Levy graduated from Brown University in 1987 and graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1992, the US attorney’s office said.
After law school, he clerked for Judge Harold H. Greene of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. He also worked for four years for Ropes & Gray, including a six-month stint with the Middlesex district attorney’s office in Cambridge District Court, the US attorney’s office said.
When he received the 2016 award, Levy told Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly that while he had represented the United States as a federal prosecutor, he was representing the country one person at a time as a defense lawyer.
“I find that equally rewarding,” he said. “And I think it’s the highest calling of a lawyer to represent someone who has the weight of the federal criminal justice system bearing down on them when you know that person is innocent.”
Brien O’Connor, a partner at Ropes & Gray who also served with Levy at the US attorney’s office years ago, told GBH, “I think also critically here, given where we are, Josh has the trust and confidence of all of the prosecutors in that office. They know him well. He’d been there as a line prosecutor, and he’s been there now as first assistant for some time.” He called Levy a person “of great character, and is not someone who’s looking to do harm in any unnecessary way to another person.”
Levy’s outside activities include serving as a board member at Steppingstone, a Boston nonprofit that seeks to help students from traditionally marginalized communities get a college education.
Kelly Glew, president of the foundation, said “the story that represents best what Josh is like” was his work creating a program that provides pro bono immigration legal help to Steppingstone students.
She described Levy as an “amazing person, smart, kind, and empathetic.”