Sandra Lynch

American judge (born 1946)

Sandra Lea Lynch (born July 31, 1946) is an American lawyer who serves as a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She is the first woman to serve on that court. Lynch served as chief judge of the First Circuit from 2008 to 2015.

Lynch was born in Oak Park, Illinois. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College in 1968, and a Juris Doctor from the Boston University School of Law in 1971.

From 1971 to 1973, Lynch served as a law clerk for Judge Raymond James Pettine of the U. S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. and the first woman to lead the firm's litigation department. At Foley, Hoag, Lynch was part of the team that represented W. R. Grace in the connection with a groundwater contamination lawsuit later profiled in the work A Civil Action. She was confirmed by the Senate on March 17, 1995, by a voice vote, and received her commission on the same day. She assumed senior status on December 31, 2022. In Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council (2000), a unanimous Supreme Court affirmed this ruling, agreeing that state statute was "invalid under the Supremacy Clause of the National Constitution owing to its threat of frustrating federal statutory objectives". In 2006, Lynch found that trading a gun for drugs constitutes a "use" of a gun for purposes of a criminal law against using a firearm in relation to drug trafficking. Her ruling was later abrogated by the Supreme Court's decision in Watson v. United States (2007). In Massachusetts v. United States Department of Health and Human Services (2012), Lynch joined a unanimous panel in holding (in an opinion written by Judge Michael Boudin) that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection principles of the Fifth Amendment, because it denied to same sex couples the federal benefits enjoyed by opposite sex couples. On October 19, 2021, Lynch wrote the majority opinion that upheld Maine's vaccine mandate for health care workers. The Supreme Court refused to review that decision.

Lynch received an Alumnae Achievement Awards from Wellesley College in 1997, and the Haskell Cohn Distinguished Judicial Service Award from the Boston Bar Association in 2011.

Lynch is married and has one son; she lives in the North End, Boston.