How do judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court / Joined 1997 / Active

Roderick L. Ireland

Justice, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Roderick L. Ireland is a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, serving since 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1944 · age 82
Tenure: Since 1997 · 28 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court	–	–

Education

Lincoln University
Columbia University in the City of New York

Judicial Record

In our data, Ireland authored 386 published opinions for the court (1997–2014), plus 27 dissents and 26 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Alphas (290 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 427 of these were attributed to Ireland by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1999	Commonwealth v. Alphas†	430 Mass. 8	290
2000	Schaer v. Brandeis University· Dissent†	432 Mass. 474	255
2001	Commonwealth v. Grandison†	433 Mass. 135	215
2005	Kobrin v. Board of Registration in Medicine†	444 Mass. 837	191
2000	Situation Management Systems, Inc. v. Malouf, Inc.†	430 Mass. 875	177
1999	Brum v. Town of Dartmouth· Concurrence†	428 Mass. 684	171
1999	Commonwealth v. Gonsalves· Concurrence†	429 Mass. 658	162
2007	Commonwealth v. Isaiah I.†	448 Mass. 334	156
1998	Commonwealth v. Wilson†	427 Mass. 336	156
2001	Sullivan v. Town of Brookline†	435 Mass. 353	147
2005	Adoption of Nancy†	443 Mass. 512	141
2002	Russell v. Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Inc.†	437 Mass. 443	138
2007	Commonwealth v. DePeiza†	449 Mass. 367	126
2008	Commonwealth v. Isaiah I.†	450 Mass. 818	119
2004	Commonwealth v. Comita†	441 Mass. 86	119

Showing the 15 most-cited of 439 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court is Roderick L. Ireland on?: Roderick L. Ireland is a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

28 years on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).