Nancy Gertner

Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is introducing a resolution to open an impeachment inquiry over new and expanded allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We discuss what we know, what we don't, and where we go from here. Guests: ... Nancy Gertner, WBUR legal analyst, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

A New York Times piece over the weekend presented a witness account of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulting a young, unnamed woman while they were both in college — a new allegation in addition to those levied against the judge during his confirmation hearing last year. ... Now, some Democrats are calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, saying they are concerned both about continued allegations of sexual misconduct and the possibility that he may have lied under oath. ... To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and James Rappaport, former chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party and director of the New Boston Fund.

Escalating an unusually public legal dispute, Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins filed an emergency petition with the state’s highest court Wednesday to overturn a judge’s ruling against a protester arrested at the Straight Pride Parade, saying he overstepped his bounds by refusing to allow her prosecutors to dismiss the charges. Boston Municipal Court Judge Richard J. Sinnott “ignored the clear and unambiguous constraints placed on the judiciary by the separation of powers” in refusing to let prosecutors drop nonviolent charges against protesters who were arrested Saturday in a clash with police, Rollins wrote in a 16-page petition to the Supreme Judicial Court...Sinnott’s stance against prosecutors drew a sharp rebuke from many legal specialists. Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Boston who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said Sinnott was making “the kinds of judgments that a prosecutor makes.” “As a judge, I oftentimes disagreed with the cases brought in front of me,” Gertner said. But, “in a system of divided power,” prosecutors decide when to bring criminal charges, she said.

There was more drama and confusion in Boston Municipal Judge Richard Sinnott's courtroom Wednesday, where prominent immigration and civil rights attorney Susan Church was held in custody for hours. Sinnott held Church in contempt of court while she was representing someone arrested for protesting this weekend's so-called "Straight Pride" parade. Guests [include] Nancy Gertner...

Thirty-six people were arrested at Saturday's Straight Pride Parade and protests. On Tuesday, Boston Municpal Court Judge Richard Sinnott denied the prosecution’s motions to dismiss charges of "disorderly conduct and resisting arrest" against seven of the arrested. There are more arraignments pending. Four officers were injured during the response to Saturday's events. We review what we know about what happened. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner:  It doesn’t seem to matter who sits in the US attorney’s office when it comes to prosecuting union members or the politicians who advocate for them. Democratic appointee Carmen Ortiz prosecuted Joseph Burhoe and John Perry of Teamsters Local 82 for extorting nonunion employers to hire union workers at various fund-raising events. She also prosecuted four Teamsters in connection with the 2014 filming of the reality TV show “Top Chef.” While Ortiz began the prosecution of Walsh administration officials Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan for Hobbs Act violations in connection with their efforts to get union jobs at the Boston Calling music festival, the case against them was enthusiastically finished by Republican appointee Andrew Lelling.

Early Wednesday morning, federal agents arrested the former president of the Massachusetts State Police union and the group's Beacon Hill lobbyist at their respective houses in Worcester and Hull. The Massachusetts U.S. attorney is charging Dana Pullman and Anne Lynch with conspiracy and obstruction of justice — accusing the two of running a scheme that gathered thousands of dollars in illegal kickbacks. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services notified local immigration attorneysthat asylum officers from Boston will be sent to the southwest border with Mexico to address the influx of asylum seekers there. It's a move Boston immigration attorneys say will impact their clients' chances of asylum. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

A recent op-ed from a progressive advocacy group that called on future Democratic presidents to shut Big Law partners out of consideration for the federal judiciary has prompted an uproar of opposition in some corners of the bar while others are nodding their heads. Law professors, plaintiffs-side trial lawyers, students, public defenders and Big Law lawyers have taken to social media in the past two days to express a full range of feelings on a proposal appearing in the Atlantic by the group Demand Justice to cut “corporate” lawyers from Democratic presidential hopefuls’ lists of potential nominees to the bench...Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, agreed that diverse backgrounds should be a factor for considering future judges, but also spoke out against a bright-line rule against Big Law. She chairs a committee that advises Massachusetts’ senators on good picks for the federal bench, and she noted that it has put forth employment lawyers, environmental lawyers and other nontraditional candidates because it has cast a wide net.

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.