Woodlock worked in the Office of Chief Counsel for the Division of Corporation Finance at the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 1973 to 1975 and was a
law clerk for Judge
Frank Jerome Murray of the
United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1976. and received his commission three days later. working with Justice
Stephen G. Breyer on the project.
Linda Greenhouse noted that both Woodlock and Breyer took "an intense hands-on role" in the development of the courthouse, which was designed by architect
Henry N. Cobb of
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. In 1996, the
American Institute of Architects honored Woodlock with its Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture for his efforts. Woodlock is a member of the
American Law Institute and the
American Judicature Society. In October 1989, the Celtics and the Jugoplastika reached a settlement, under which the Celtics partially bought out Radja's contract with Jugoplastika, so that Radja would play for Jugoplastika during the
1989–90 season, but could play for the Celtics starting in the
1990–91 season. In a 1995 suit under the
Alien Tort Claims Act, Woodlock ordered
Hector Gramajo, a former Guatemalan general and defense minister, to pay $47.5 million in damages to nine plaintiffs, for his role in overseeing a campaign of repression and human rights abuses during the
Guatemalan Civil War. The plaintiffs were eight Gutamalean
Canjobal indigenous people and American nun
Dianna Ortiz, who brought claims for human rights violations that included the razing of Canjobal villages and the torture of Ortiz. In his ruling, Woodlock wrote: "Gramajo was aware of and supported widespread acts of brutality committed under his command resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. The evidence suggests that Gramajo devised and directed the implementation of an indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians." In 2008, Woodlock presided over a case involving the
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), in which he issued an injunction barring three students at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology from disclosing security vulnerabilities in the MBTA's
CharlieCard system; the decision was controversial, and resulting press attention resulted in further publicity of the security lapse. In September 2010, Woodlock issued a lengthy opinion denying the town's motion to dismiss the suit, and the parties reached a settlement the following month, in which the Town paid $1 million and agreed to have officials undergo civil rights training. In 2020, Woodlock issued a preliminary order directing the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts to allow gun stores (but not shooting ranges) to reopen, overruling Governor
Charlie Baker's executive order to the extent it excluded gun retailers from a list of essential retailers permitted to remain open during the
coronavirus pandemic. Applying
intermediate scrutiny to the
Second Amendment question, Woodlock found that the commonwealth had failed to establish "a substantial fit between the goals of the emergency declared by the commonwealth and the burdening of the constitutional rights," noting that
liquor stores were deemed essential but gun retailers were not. In 2010, Woodlock sentenced computer hacker
Albert Gonzalez to 20 years and one day in prison, after Gonzalez pleaded guilty the previous year to hacking
Heartland Payment Systems' corporate computer system as part of a scheme to steal millions of payment card numbers. In 2010, Woodlock accepted the guilty plea of
Dianne Wilkerson, a former member of the
Massachusetts Senate who pleaded guilty to attempted extortion and admitted that she had accepted bribes, and the next year, Woodlock sentenced her to three and a half years in prison. Also in 2011, Woodlock sentenced former Boston city councilor
Chuck Turner to three years in prison for accepting a $1,000 bribe, citing Turner's false statements to the FBI and "ludicrously perjurious testimony" as reasons for the sentence. In 2012, Woodlock sentenced Catherine E. Greig, the longtime companion of Boston organized crime figure
James "Whitey" Bulger, to eight years in jail. Greig pleaded guilty to harboring Bulger while he was a fugitive from justice. The sentence was affirmed on appeal. In 2014, Woodlock oversaw the criminal proceedings against two friends of
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who were convicted of
obstruction of justice for destroying evidence and lying to authorities who were investigating the crime. ==Publications==