After 40 years on the federal bench, Judge William G. Young recently experienced what he viewed as a career first, and it didn’t sit well with him.
“I have never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Judge Young said on Monday, excoriating the Trump administration in a lengthy speech from the U.S. District Court in Boston.
In keeping with his usual process, he had ordered a quick trial to debate the merits of two lawsuits challenging some of the government’s cuts to research grants and programs administered by the National Institutes of Health — the first trial in the more than 400 cases contesting nearly all aspects of President Trump’s agenda winding their way through the courts.
The grants at issue, which funded research into diversity-related topics like health disparities in Black and L.G.B.T.Q. communities, were canceled by Mr. Trump and N.I.H. leadership as part of the administration’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and roll back transgender rights. Judge Young cast his decision to block the cuts as his duty in following the Constitution.
“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion, but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it: that this represents racial discrimination,” he said.
That Judge Young would deliver such a frank ruling was perhaps unsurprising. His long career — President Ronald Reagan appointed him in 1985 — has been punctuated by high-profile cases and outspoken advocacy for the value and fact-finding power of the judiciary.
In addition to the N.I.H. cases, Judge Young will preside this summer over other closely watched legal showdowns involving the Trump administration, including a lawsuit challenging the government’s efforts to deport student activists and a case brought by Democratic-led states against the Trump administration’s moves to halt progress on offshore wind farms as part of the president’s enmity toward renewable energy.
The case involving student activists, which will proceed to a trial on July 7, has emerged as a key test of the limits on Mr. Trump’s executive authority in his campaign to deport international students, and of the extent to which free speech rights apply to foreign nationals.
Born in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island, Judge Young served as a captain in the Army between earning his undergraduate and law degrees at Harvard University. After law school, he went on to clerk for a judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Judge Young declined to comment for this article, citing pending cases. But in a document published on the Boston federal court’s website called his “Common Book,” he described the piece of advice given to him that he called “the lodestar of my own judicial practice.”
“This is a trial court. Trial judges ought go on the bench every day and try cases,” he wrote, quoting Justice John Henry Meagher, who served on the Massachusetts Superior Court.
At 84, Judge Young has kept up a fast-track approach, often collapsing procedural hearings together in an effort to push ahead to the substance of a trial.
Even after taking senior status in 2021 — a moment when judges typically begin carrying a reduced caseloads — he has continued to manage a heavy docket, and delves into extended, informal disquisitions about his thinking on the matters before him.
In a sea of novel legal questions created by Mr. Trump’s maximalist approach to power, Judge Young often enters as a veteran, forecasting possible legal minefields and urging the lawyers involved to come prepared.
Even in minor procedural hearings in the student activists case, he has pressed for early answers from the government about how campus demonstrations — in support of Palestinians and against the current Israeli government — were deemed a threat to the national interest by the secretary of state.
In that case, the groups suing the Trump administration have proposed introducing witnesses to speak to a climate of fear that their speech about Israel’s military campaign could be grounds for deportation. In a May hearing, Judge Young warned the government’s lawyers that any developments that could be seen as witness intimidation would draw “a severe adverse inference” from the court.
“This is a trial, I think it’s a trial of some public significance, so let me say a couple of things about that,” he said.
“If there’s any threats or you are approached in any way, clients or lawyers, about your representation in this case, the issue of obstruction of justice is raised,” he warned. “This is a trial. Trials are meant to be resolved on evidence with the cool, reflective, impartial adjudication of the facts.”
Judge Young has confronted his share of ugly and difficult cases in his four decades on the bench. As a Massachusetts Superior Court judge, before he was appointed to the District Court by Mr. Reagan, he oversaw the trial of four men later convicted of aggravated rape. The case inspired the 1988 film “The Accused,” starring Jodie Foster.
In 2002, Judge Young presided over the trial of Richard C. Reid, the Al Qaeda member known as the shoe bomber, who shouted a screed of threats when Judge Young sentenced him to life in prison over his plot to blow up a flight.
“You’re not going to stand me down. You’ll go down,” Mr. Reid yelled at his sentencing. “Your flag will come down and so will your country.”
“You see that flag, Mr. Reid? That’s the flag of the United States of America,” Judge Young responded. “That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten.”
Still, over the years, Judge Young has demonstrated a willingness to interrogate his profession. He has questioned the norms that underpin the justice system, and called out what he saw as flaws that put criminal defendants at a disadvantage. At different times, he has criticized mandatory sentencing guidelines and a culture of plea deals that he has said unfairly discourage people from seeking a jury trial.
In 2003, he wrote an open letter to his colleagues across the country, warning that “the American jury system is dying” as settlements, plea deals and arbitration had led to a sharp drop off in jury trials. The letter called for renewed efforts by the courts to make jury trials accessible and common once more.
“We preside over the largest, most daring, and most successful experiment in direct democracy ever attempted in the history of the world — the American jury system,” he wrote.
By the staid standards of most courtrooms, Judge Young’s stands out for the loose and unpretentious — if sometimes unorthodox — atmosphere he cultivates.
In contrast to the many stark, windowless and fluorescent-lit federal courtrooms around the country, he decorates his with artwork by his father, Woodhull Young, a painter known for maritime scenes. At one point this year, he politely invited a judge from Japan, who was in court as part of a visiting fellowship at Harvard, to sit next to him on the bench, giving the lawyers arguing before him that day two jurists to face.
During some high-profile trials, he has been known to encourage participation and engagement from jurors, inviting them to not only pose legal questions to him, but also directly to witnesses. In a federal corruption trial in 2014, his invitation reportedly resulted in more than 270 juror inquiries, according to reporting by CommonWealth Beacon, a Massachusetts news outlet.
And before the media spectacle surrounding the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Judge Young participated in an early program aimed at introducing video cameras into federal courtrooms, an idea that has never fully gained traction despite pressure from several top lawmakers and public interest organizations.
“I’m very comfortable with it,” he said in an interview in 1993. “I think it should be extended to criminal proceedings.”
Judge Young’s frankness on the bench may not be unique among federal jurists, but it has been pronounced in recent months when Justice Department lawyers have at times struggled to rationalize policies the government has pursued.
Leading up to the trial on Monday concerning the science grants, Judge Young had for weeks pressed government lawyers to come back with evidence about the process through which those grants were canceled, and answers about what authorities the administration had relied on.
“I have real concerns about even handedness here: I have concerns about, we’re talking about health care; I have concerns about Black Americans; I have concerns about women; I have concerns about legitimate gender issues having to do with health,” he said during a hearing in May.
“Don’t any of you take this as prejudging anything: It isn’t,” he added. “It’s just the court’s attempt to be fully transparent and to grapple with the issues that the court is duty bound to grapple with.”
When the government returned to present its case on Monday, many of the same questions re-emerged, and Judge Young reached his conclusion: The Trump administration had purposefully stopped health research that benefits vulnerable or underserved Americans.
“That’s appalling,” he said.
With Monday’s ruling, Judge Young joined the ranks of other federal judges, including several Trump appointees, who have dealt a legal blow to Mr. Trump’s agenda, however temporary. The Department of Health and Human Services has indicated it will appeal. Mr. Trump and his advisers have in recent months repeatedly criticized the federal judiciary, calling for judges who rule against him to be impeached.
Despite his outspokenness, Judge Young’s words at times betray a yearning for a less divisive climate. In both his monologues from the bench and in small flourishes in his rulings, he often nods to the ceremony and tradition of the courts in a way that recalls a time when mutual respect and deference to the law were more standard in relations between the executive and judicial branches.
On the last page of an opinion in April, in which he declined to dismiss the case concerning student activists, he added a footnote at the end, explaining a change in how he signs orders.
“Now that I’m a senior district judge I adopt this format in honor of all the judicial colleagues, state and federal, with whom I have had the privilege to serve over the past 47 years,” he wrote.
Instead of the typical “United States District Judge” that underlines most filings from his peers, the signature simply read: “William G. Young, Judge of the United States.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts.
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