Rachael Rollins was born into an interracial family that met around the time Loving v. Virginia deemed interracial marriage illegal. Her father fought in Vietnam and her mother was a nursing student at Boston University. After settling in Dorchester they decided it would be safer to start a family in Cambridge. Rachael is the oldest of 5 children.

She graduated from High School in 1989 and was selected for a lacrosse scholarship at Umass Amherst. At the end of her freshman year, 3 women’s teams were dropped due to budget cuts and no male teams were affected. Rachael participated in a Title IX lawsuit which helped to reinstate the cut teams. This was her first exposure to a lawsuit and it sparked her interest in law. She attended Northeastern law School and went on to Georgetown to get her Masters.

Rachael was the first person of color to work as the General Counsel of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the first female General Counsel of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority under Deval Patrick. In 2013 she was recruited to become  the Chief Legal Counsel of the Massachusetts Port Authority.

She took an intensive 6 month program at Harvard Business School and shortly after was diagnosed with breast cancer. Rachael was able to fight it and now lives cancer free. The experience has allowed her to appreciate her everyday life and live it to the fullest. She continues to give back to the community and now as District Attorney, wants to change the way we think of incarceration and immigration.