Jus­tice Ron­nie Boodoos­ingh has been sworn in as Chief Jus­tice af­ter he re­ceived his in­stru­ment of ap­point­ment this af­ter­noon from Act­ing Pres­i­dent Wade Mark at Pres­i­dent’s House in the pres­ence of sev­er­al dig­ni­taries, in­clud­ing out­go­ing Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie and At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie.

Mo­ments af­ter tak­ing the oath of of­fice Jus­tice Boodoos­ingh promised to “per­form the func­tions of the Chief Jus­tice to the best of my abil­i­ty” and to build on the foun­da­tion laid by his pre­de­ces­sors.

“I un­der­stand the grav­i­ty and im­por­tance of this of­fice and the trust in which I have en­tered with the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he said, adding that he would “try to walk humbly” while lead­ing the Ju­di­cia­ry.

Jus­tice Boodoos­ingh ex­pressed deep ap­pre­ci­a­tion to out­go­ing Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie for what he de­scribed as a “sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion” to the Ju­di­cia­ry over 18 years, high­light­ing Archie’s lead­er­ship through the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the in­tro­duc­tion of elec­tron­ic fil­ing and vir­tu­al court­rooms, and the es­tab­lish­ment of spe­cialised courts. “Trinidad and To­ba­go owes our out­go­ing Chief Jus­tice the deep­est debt of grat­i­tude,” he said, al­so thank­ing Archie’s fam­i­ly for their sup­port through­out his tenure.

Even as he looked ahead to his own fu­ture, Jus­tice Boodoos­ingh said he hoped to strength­en the Ju­di­cia­ry fur­ther. “I will at­tempt to build on the plat­form of the pre­vi­ous Chief Jus­tice and the Chief Jus­tices who have gone be­fore me to en­sure that when it is time to move on, that I too, like Chief Jus­tice Archie, would leave the Ju­di­cia­ry in a bet­ter place than I met it.”

Jus­tice Boodoos­ingh, who joined the Ju­di­cia­ry as a High Court judge in Sep­tem­ber 2007, has served in both the crim­i­nal and civ­il ju­ris­dic­tions. In 2020, he was el­e­vat­ed to the Court of Ap­peal.

Be­fore join­ing the bench, he lec­tured at the Hugh Wood­ing Law School, where he be­came Course Di­rec­tor of the Tri­al Ad­vo­ca­cy Pro­gramme in 2007 and served as coach and ad­vi­sor to the school’s moot teams, in­clud­ing the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice Moot Team. He holds a Bach­e­lor of Laws de­gree, a Le­gal Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate, and a Mas­ter of Laws in In­ter­na­tion­al Dis­pute Res­o­lu­tion.