NORTHAMPTON — The state’s top law enforcement official will talk Monday at Smith College about the role people can play in upholding the Constitution.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s talk, part of Smith College’s Presidential Colloquium series, is free and open to the public at 4:30 p.m. in Wright Hall’s Weinstein Auditorium, 7 College Lane.
Healey’s contribution to the colloquium series will take place a day after — and in observance of — Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.
Smith’s colloquium series brings influential leaders in a wide range of fields to share their expertise and offer incites on key social, political and global topics.
This year, Smith College has hosted political commentators Ana Navarro and Rachel Maddow, psychologist Robert Kegan and professor, scholar and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as part of the series.
Healey is the first openly gay attorney general in the United States. She has held the office since 2015, after she won her first election and replaced her former boss, Martha Coakley.
Healey grew up in Hampton Falls, N.H., just north of Massachusetts, the oldest of five children. After graduating high school, she attended Harvard University, where she was captain of the basketball team and majored in government. She earned a law degree at Northeastern University. Early in her career, Healey worked as a prosecutor in Middlesex County and as a litigation partner at WilmerHale, a Boston law firm.
Healey then worked in the Massachusetts attorney general’s office for seven years, holding leadership positions as chief of the Civil Rights Division and as director of both the Public Protection and Advocacy Bureau and the Business and Labor Bureau.
Since taking office, Healey has focused on consumer protection, gun violence, health care, heroin and prescription drug abuse, student loans and improving the criminal justice system.