Nancy Gertner

To prove that Mr. Manafort defrauded banks, prosecutors need to show he deliberately lied about financial facts, said Nancy Gertner, a former United States District Judge and a professor at Harvard Law School.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Let's take a closer look at Wednesday's major ruling out of the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, split along conservative and liberal lines, the court ruled that public sector unions cannot compel government workers to help pay for collective bargaining...In a scorching dissent, whose rage practically leaps off the page, Justice Elena Kagan accused the court of "weaponizing" the First Amendment, saying this was not the first time the court had sidestepped its role as legal body and used speech protections to choose winners and losers in long running political debates.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. In an 8-1 opinion today, the Supreme Court ruled that if an immigrant is given a "notice to appear" in immigration court, that it must designate a specific time or place. The case, Pereira v. Sessions, originated on Martha's Vineyard with a man who entered the country from Brazil 16 years ago and overstayed his visa. The decision could affect thousands of immigrants living in the United States without authorization.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. The Supreme Court today ruled on South Dakota vs. Wayfair, writing that states can collect sales taxes from businesses even if they do not have a physical presence in the state. The 5-4 ruling effectively overturned its own 1992 decision in Quill vs. North Dakota that restricted states from collecting some sales taxes.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. A report released today by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General found that former FBI Director James Comey acted outside the procedural norms of the FBI and the DOJ while conducting the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. The report also found no evidence of political bias in the FBI's handling of the case.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Just when we have finally come to see the opioid crisis as both a public health and public safety problem, Governor Charlie Baker and others would have us careen in the opposite direction. Take the case of Manuel Soto-Vittini of Peabody. Salem Superior Court Judge Timothy Feeley sentenced Soto-Vittini to probation for possession with intent to distribute 15 grams of heroin and a small amount of cocaine. Soto-Vittini had no criminal convictions, just a dismissed drug-possession charge from a decade ago, when he was 22.

Do we really need to litigate every school dress code in federal court? The ACLU and the National Women’s Law Center think so. They argue that rules against inappropriate attire perpetuate “gender stereotypes” in violation of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Since its passage in 1972, Title IX has unleashed a flood of opportunity for women and girls in the classroom and on the playing field...In short, Title IX has been an incredible success. Unfortunately, however, the law that was intended to break down barriers to opportunity is now being misused to change the way students and teachers think about gender generally...As such, Melnick joins a growing chorus of principled liberal voices, including feminist scholar Laura Kipnis, former federal judge Nancy Gertner, legal affairs reporter Stuart Taylor, and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk, who have opposed the use of Title IX to chill speech, deny due process, and prevent educators from resolving controversial issues without litigation.

If you wanted to feel the full force of the intellectual whirlpool that is American politics in 2018, the place to go on February 25 was the Village Underground, a nightclub beneath East 3rd Street, where Alan Dershowitz, the longtime Harvard Law professor and civil liberties lion, was debating the future of American democracy on the side of President Donald Trump...The woman behind us in line took her free book, turned to her husband and asked, “What happened to Alan Dershowitz?”...“People everywhere ask what happened to him,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and lecturer at Harvard Law School who has known Dershowitz for years. “I get that from everyone who knows I know him.”...Dershowitz’s supporters see his position on Trump as consistent with the rest of his career. “If you look objectively at what he’s doing, he’s applying neutral civil liberties principles to Trump, as he would to anyone else,” said Harvey Silverglate, a civil rights lawyer in Boston and a longtime friend of Dershowitz’s. Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith told me, similarly, “Alan has obviously throughout his entire career been a principled defender of civil liberties, especially for those under criminal investigation. His commentary in the last year is entirely consistent with that lifelong commitment.”

An interview with Nancy Gertner. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will resign after four women told The New Yorker he choked and repeatedly slapped them during romantic relationships. Schneiderman had filed over 100 legal or administrative actions against President Trump and congressional Republicans. What will his departure mean for the future of those actions and the agenda of attorney general's office?

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Yesterday, The New York Times published a list of dozens of questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller hopes to ask President Trump as part of his investigation. The questions cover a wide range of topics, and provide the most in-depth look at what the Special Counsel's investigation is focusing on to date.

President Trump’s interview Thursday on “Fox & Friends,” in which he blasted the Justice Department and admitted for the first time publicly that his personal attorney represented him in a hush-money payout to a porn star, was ill-advised even if it didn’t immediately place him in legal jeopardy, specialists said. “He’s unmoored, is the only way to describe it,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School. Gertner, who’s emerged as a high-profile critic of Trump among legal scholars, said she was taken aback by comments the president made that “suggest he plans to obstruct justice or is motivated to obstruct justice.”

Some spirited sniping between two Harvard Law School giants might be funny in some context, were the fate of Western democracy not potentially tottering in the balance. In an Ali-Frazier battle of legal minds, former federal judge Nancy Gertner this week smote celebrated legal scholar Alan Dershowitz in the opinion section of The New York Times, accusing him of falsely smearing Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether or not the Trump campaign was in on it. Gertner and Dershowitz are longtime friends, but the highbrow exchange had an edge. Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, lumped Dershowitz, the loquacious Harvard law professor emeritus, in the same paragraph with partisan mouthpieces Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Was Robert Mueller, the special counsel, complicit in one of the worst scandals in the F.B.I.’s history — the decades-long wrongful imprisonment of four men for a murder they didn’t commit? This question, which has been raised before, is being addressed again — this time by some of President Trump’s most ardent supporters on the right, especially Fox News’s Sean Hannity but also Rush Limbaugh and others. My friend Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Law School professor, has also weighed in. In an April 8 interview with John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that Mr. Mueller was “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an F.B.I. informer.”

Official federal sentencing guidelines don’t distinguish between female and male offenders. They often downplay or outright disregard circumstances that are common among women, such as the role of an offender as the sole caretaker for children or an offender having been coerced into committing a crime. But judges commonly compensate ad hoc, which has led to women on the whole receiving much shorter sentences than men when facing the same punishments. Critics say the sentencing benchmarks should provide more flexibility from the start — a change that would benefit women like James but also men in similar circumstances, whose extenuating factors may be even more likely to be overlooked. “The notion that you simply deal with a complicated situation by saying, ‘Let’s ignore the complexity,’ is idiotic,” said former federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

A federal court judge said Monday he won't re-issue proposed instructions to a jury that will hear the case of two Boston city officials who are accused of conspiracy and extortion in an effort to strong-arm the music festival Boston Calling into hiring union workers. Prosecutors say the instructions could sink their case. For more on the decision and on the upcoming trial, WBUR legal analyst and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner joined Morning Edition.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. By January 6, the Powerball lottery jackpot hit a new high at $560 million - one of the largest in U.S. history. The winner was a woman from Southern New Hampshire, who is arguing in court for her right to remain anonymous. A team of lawyers went to court this week to fight for her anonymity.

Cliven Bundy wanted to walk out of the courtroom in his jail jumpsuit and ankle shackles. Deputy marshals blocked him from doing that. But if it hadn’t been for “flagrant misconduct” committed by federal prosecutors and investigators in the case, the Nevada cattleman may not have been walking out at all...The report suggests that parallel construction may be being employed to conceal information gathered through legally questionable methods. Whether it is obtained unlawfully or not is beside the point, according to Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School lecturer who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011, since the practice transfers the decision of what information gets disclosed to defendants from judges to law enforcement and prosecutors. “You can envision a situation where they think they’re doing something legal but they’re not sure, so they use parallel construction,” she adds.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Paul Butler. To say that President Trump cannot be charged with obstruction of justice in connection with James Comey’s firing just because the president had the authority to fire him — as Trump’s counsel John Dowd says — is simply wrong.

The audience could sense where the story was going almost as soon as Bryan Stevenson began telling it. Two black children in the barely desegregated South, hurtling with giddy, unguarded elation toward their first swim in a pool that until recently had been available only to whites... Nancy Gertner, a retired U.S. judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, deplored the mandatory sentencing rules that reduce defendants to “the quantity of drugs, their criminal record, and nothing else.” ... Friendly professor of law Carol Steiker looked back at the past few hundred years of American death penalty laws.

For the past 30 years, lawyer and social activist Bryan Stevenson ’85 has battled through the courts, defending wrongly convicted death-row prisoners and children prosecuted as adults, while condemning mass incarceration, excessive sentences, and racial bias in the criminal justice system...Delivering the 2017 Tanner Lecture on Human Values on Wednesday, Stevenson announced a planned memorial to honor more than 4,000 victims of lynching in the U.S. and a museum that traces the country’s history of racial inequality from enslavement to mass incarceration...Afterward, Homi K. Bhabha, director of the Humanities Center, led a panel discussion on the issues of mass incarceration, racial injustice, and the death penalty. Among the panelists were Nancy Gertner, senior lecturer on law at the Law School and a retired U.S. district judge; Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Philosophy, and Carol S. Steiker, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at the Law School. Reflecting on her years on the bench, Gertner criticized mandatory minimum sentencing, a legal trend that was a product of the war on drugs that led to the surge in the number of African-Americans in the federal prison population...Steiker spoke about the history of the death penalty in the United States and talked about its racial basis. The United States is the only Western democracy that uses capital punishment, she said, and is a leader internationally in doing so.