Nancy Gertner

Nathan Carman is either a criminal mastermind, or the victim of a series of unfortunate, fatal events. His aunts say he shot his multimillionaire grandfather to death in 2013, and killed his mother on a fishing trip in 2016 to get a portion of the family’s $44 million estate. But 25-year-old Carman has so far eschewed criminal charges, let alone gone to criminal court...After a six year legal battle that depicts the inner workings of an upper-class New England family, which feels like something out of the show Revenge, what finally lured Carmen to a witness stand in Rhode Island’s federal courthouse Thursday, was an $85,000 boat insurance claim...Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor and former federal judge, also says Carman’s testimony in the boat insurance trial “could be used in the homicide case” and handed over to a prosecutor. And Carman could have avoided all of this if he backed down from the $85,000 claim. But he didn’t.

An article by Nancy Gertner and Gail Heriot: In the early days of the Republic, states typically limited the right to vote to “freeholders”—defined as persons who owned land worth a certain amount of money.  It was thought that, among other things, property-less individuals had no stake in the community or might be inclined to vote for profligate spending, since they were not subject to property taxes. Still, land was cheap, and the qualification level was usually set low, so a large majority of free, adult males could vote.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr says the Department of Justice has found "serious irregularities" at the Manhattan jail where financier Jeffrey Epstein apparently killed himself over the weekend. Media reports suggest Epstein was left unsupervised at the time of his death despite a prior suicide attempt in July. Barr also said today that Epstein's death won't stop the investigations into his alleged sex trafficking of young women. Guest Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

On a crisp and gray September morning, Jeannie Suk Gersen stepped into a lecture hall at Tufts University...Gersen is a feminist legal scholar and a writer of wry, slightly elliptical commentary on legal matters at The New Yorker. She is our foremost guide to the challenges that the #MeToo movement poses to the legal system. She has staked out a position at once conventional and embattled. She shares #MeToo’s goal of ending the impunity surrounding sexual assault. But she remains committed to the principles of due process, presumption of innocence, and the right to a fair hearing. This commitment places her in tension with some of the most impassioned actors in American public life, some of whom have come to regard due process as a fatal obstacle to deterring and punishing sexual misconduct...Gersen, [Janet] Halley, [Elizabeth] Bartholet, and [Nancy] Gertner designed an alternative set of Title IX procedures — applicable only to Harvard Law students — that the Office for Civil Rights eventually certified as meeting the requirements laid out in the Dear Colleague letter, while also satisfying the principles of fair process as Gersen and her colleagues understood them.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey announced they will reconvene a bipartisan advisory committee, that will include Worcester County Sheriff Lew Evangelidis, to review and provide recommendations on federal District Court candidates across Massachusetts...The Advisory Committee comprises distinguished members of the state's legal community, including prominent academics and litigators, and is chaired by former District Court Judge Nancy Gertner..Applications for Boston vacancies are reviewed by...Judge Gertner and... Professor Andrew Kaufman of Harvard Law School..

Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress today, largely sticking to his earlier insistence that he would not depart from his written report if called before the cameras. He did refute a key mantra that Trump has frequently invoked by clarifying that his report did not, in fact, exculpate the president, and also took the time to warn Americans that efforts to undermine our nation’s democracy continue today at an alarming rate. But beyond a few key moments, did the public learn anything new about the investigation or its findings? Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, who is now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law; and former U.S. attorney Donald Stern, who worked alongside Robert Mueller both during his stint with the Department of Justice and in private practice at Hale and Dorr.

Burning Man and the federal government have a history of disagreeing over law enforcement tactics, and this year is already off to a rocky start even though the event is two months away. After the release of a more than 300-page report from the Bureau of Land Management that details future expectations of the 80,000-person event, Burners already are protesting possible screenings for weapons and drugs. BLM officials noted in the report that they plan to contract a private security firm to "screen vehicles and participants, vendors and contractors, and staff and volunteers entering the event." Officials have emphasized that the operation will be comprised of screenings, not searches...[According to retired U.S. District Court Judge Nancy] Gertner: A screening could cover a number of activities, but if they pat down people when they come to Burning Man to see if they have drugs, then that’s a search. You can’t call it anything else. If they say to the person, 'Do you have drugs on you?' and they can say 'No,' then that’s arguably not illegal... If all they’re doing is asking a question, then I suppose the inquiry is not a search. If it’s just a conversation, it could pass muster. If it’s any touching or searching bags, that's a search.

Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law and WBUR's Legal analyst joins us to discuss two Supreme Court decisions — Gundy v. United States and The American Legion v. American Humanist Association — and their implications.

President Donald Trump's unscripted musings about the transgender military ban in an interview with Piers Morgan earlier this week could complicate his administration's efforts to argue in support of the policy in federal court. Legal experts told Newsweek that plaintiffs in several of the cases challenging the ban will take note of Trump's commentary, but cautioned that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court might be disinterested in interjections from the commander-in-chief...."What he is saying is actually inconsistent with what the government said on appeal," retired federal judge and Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner observed. "The government said that this did not apply to people in the process of getting gender dysphoria surgery, that it didn't sweep that broadly. The president's comments suggest that he wants it to sweep as broadly."

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and P. Sabin Willett: Federal officials roaming the states, seizing persons deemed “illegal” under federal law, detaining them, transporting them elsewhere. States objecting; communities declaring themselves “sanctuary cities.” This narrative did not begin with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. It hearkens to an earlier time, an infamous chapter of American history. Once before, residents of Massachusetts and other northern states were deemed “illegal” under federal law, rounded up by federal authorities and shipped south — to the slave states whence they had escaped. While slavery disappeared from Massachusetts soon after the republic was founded, it survived in many southern states. Free or not, Massachusetts citizens were subject to federal law, and that meant the reach of the federal Fugitive Slave Acts, a pair of laws passed in 1793 and 1850.

Attorney General Maura Healey on Thursday blasted the federal indictment of a state district court judge on obstruction charges for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant defendant evade a federal immigration officer last year in Newton District Court. ... Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School and who last year published a Globe op-ed defending Joseph after the story broke, was firmly in Healey’s camp Thursday. In a telephone interview, Gertner called Lelling’s decision to seek criminal charges against a state court judge an act of “grandstanding.” “The notion of hauling a state court judge into federal court under these circumstances is outrageous,” Gertner said. “It has implications beyond Judge Joseph. Are they going to go into a church and arrest the reverend for permitting sanctuary to immigrants? There are so many levels to this incredibly excessive, overreaching, grandstanding prosecution.”

U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling is charging a trial court judge and a former court officer with obstruction of justice. The charges stem from an incident that occurred last April, when the pair allegedly helped a man slip out the back door of a Newton courthouse to avoid detention by federal immigration authorities. Middlesex County Judge Shelley M. Richmond and now-retired court officer Wesley MacGregor are facing three obstruction charges, including conspiracy, aiding and abetting and obstruction of a federal proceeding. ... Guests: Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team found no evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign to rig the 2016 presidential election. But legal experts said Thursday that the highly anticipated Mueller report doesn’t shut the door on the question of whether President Trump obstructed the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling. ... Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who teaches at Harvard Law School, noted in an e-mail that the federal obstruction law covers a wide array of actions. “The statute talks not only about actual obstruction but also endeavor to obstruct,” Gertner wrote in an e-mail. “The report suggests that Trump ‘endeavored’ to obstruct but those around him would not comply. And ‘endeavor’ has to come with a corrupt intent. The AG seems to think that if Trump was not conspiring with the Russians, there was no corrupt intent. But the purpose of his attempted obstruction didn’t have to be to stop a Russian conspiracy investigation.”

The redacted version of the Mueller Report is out, and we've spent all day reading through the 448 pages. We discuss the report and what we've absorbed of it thus far, and try to make sense of what it all means.Guests: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. She tweets @ngertner; Donald Stern, former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts from 1993 to 2001, and managing director of corporate monitoring and consulting services at Affiliated Monitors.; David Gergen, adviser to four U.S. Presidents — Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton — and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He tweets @David_Gergen. and Joe Battenfeld, Political columnist at the Boston Herald and host of "Battenfeld" on Boston Herald Radio. He tweets @joebattenfeld.

The Mueller will be released Thursday morning. We lay out what's at stake politically and legally. McKay Coppins, staff writer for The Atlantic. Author of "The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House." (@mckaycoppins) Nancy Gertner, retired Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. (@ngertner) Mark Updegrove, author, presidential historian for ABC News. President and CEO of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation. Director of the LBJ Presidential Library from 2009 to 2017.

An uphill fight awaits defense lawyers who are representing former congressman Robin Hayes and campaign donor Greg Lindberg in a pending federal corruption case, legal experts say. Still, those lawyers are likely to use court motions to challenge the government’s central assertion — that Hayes, Lindberg and two of Lindberg’s associates took part in a scheme to bribe North Carolina insurance commissioner Mike Causey. ... Several legal experts agreed that at least some of the defendants will likely plead guilty instead of going to trial. That’s what happens in 97 percent of federal criminal cases, said Harvard Law School professor Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge. “In a situation where the government has tapes, the pressure to plead guilty is substantial,” Gertner said.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: Just when it seemed everyone was open to new ideas about criminal justice, after last year’s reform bill, Thomas Turco, the state secretary of public safety and security, rehashed old tropes, and worse, old politics in blasting Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins’s prosecution plans. Turco’s broadside was released to the press without notice to the new DA; Rollins’s reply was swift, attacking Governor Charlie Baker for authorizing it. The reported rapprochement between the two officials, while admirable, shouldn’t obscure some of the larger issues the dust-up reveals. Turco criticized Rollins’s “decline to prosecute” list, ignoring crucial details in her 65-page plan. A Suffolk prosecutor was obliged to decline or divert certain offenses unless he or she got permission from a more experienced supervisor. (Turco ignored the “unless” clause.) The list consists of nonviolent crimes involving drugs, property, and offenses like driving with a suspended license, and it makes sense.

After nearly two years of investigation, interviews and indictments, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's job is officially done. While his report has not been released to the public, Attorney General William Barr has released a summary, stating that Mueller did not find evidence that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the foreign government’s election interference activities. ... To decipher the impact—for the president, and for the American people—Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and commentator Jennifer Braceras of the conservative think tank Independent Women’s Forum.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is over. Attorney General William Barr gave his summary of the report's findings Sunday—and said the special counsel did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it attempted to conspire or coordinate with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Republicans nationally and locally are celebrating the news. But Democrats, including those in Massachusetts' congressional delegation, say the four-page summary should not be the final chapter of this story. Guests: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. She tweets @ngertner.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting, Ryan Goodman and Nancy Gertner: In public remarks last month, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein hinted about the fate of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on the results of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. While not speaking about any particular case, Rosenstein reiterated the department’s policy of not publicly commenting on the evidence in cases where charges are not brought. This might affect the report’s release, as Mueller is expected to abide by the Justice Department’s policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Rosenstein described his message he has given to prosecutors and agents during his tenure: “If we aren’t prepared to prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt in court, then we have no business making allegations against American citizens.” Attorney General William P. Barr’s message at his confirmation hearing in January was much the same: “If you’re not going to indict someone, you don’t stand up there and unload negative information about the person.” The policy reflects a basic norm within the Justice Department. Then-FBI director James B. Comey was widely condemned, including by the department’s inspector general, for violating it during the 2016 presidential campaign when he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton’s conduct regarding the use of a private email server while secretary of state, even as Comey announced that the FBI had not found sufficient evidence to recommend criminal charges. Yet a closer look at the department’s policy suggests that Rosenstein’s approach might not apply to the Mueller report.

Time is running out for Michael Cohen, who has less than two months until he reports to prison. ...Cohen’s credibility is under siege after he admitted that he lied to lawmakers. Prosecutors have already pored through Cohen’s seized electronics and documents for evidence. If Cohen does have a magic bullet, it would have to be unique information providing prosecutors an investigative road map against Trump, said former federal judge Nancy Gertner. “If he testified about information on the inner workings of the Trump business that they wouldn’t otherwise have, that would be very helpful to investigators” and Cohen, said Gertner, who teaches at Harvard Law School.