Nancy Gertner

Earlier this week, President Trump took a question about the timing of his pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Trump said, "In the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally. You know the hurricane was just starting. And I put it out that I had pardoned, as we say, Sheriff Joe.” Hurricane or not, it was a deeply controversial pardon. We dissect the legal questions surrounding it. Guest: Nancy Gertner,

Four Harvard Law School faculty members are pushing for the Department of Education to revise Obama-era Title IX standards governing how universities respond to sexual harassment and assault on campus. In a memo submitted to the Department of Education last week, Law School professors Janet E. Halley, Elizabeth D. Bartholet ’62, and Jeannie Suk Gersen and lecturer Nancy Gertner called on the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to reevaluate the standards put forth in the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. However distasteful, the fact is that President Trump has the legal authority to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona for his criminal contempt conviction, in accordance with the US Supreme Court’s 1925 ruling in Ex Parte Grossman. Grossman was ordered to stop selling liquor during Prohibition. He ignored the order and was jailed until a presidential pardon led to his release. The district court that had issued the original contempt order persisted and rearrested Grossman, finding that contempt is an offense to the “dignity and authority” of the federal courts. To allow the executive to intervene in the contempt process, the court held, would undermine judicial independence.

President Donald Trump hinted during a speech in Arizona on Tuesday that he plans to pardon former Sheriff Joe Arpaio over his federal contempt-of-court conviction, but the president said he wouldn't take such an action immediately in order to avoid "controversy." Trump, speaking at a rally in Phoenix, suggested that relief was on the way for the 85-year-old ex-lawman known for his tough treatment of illegal immigrants...“It’s ‘in-your-face, court,’” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “This is the kind of charge that goes to the integrity of the process…. Part of the symbol here is of basically not paying respect to an order of a federal judge.” “It’s not unlawful, but it says something about his own contempt for the system,” she added.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. President Trump is notoriously obsessed with leaks in his administration — so much so that Attorney General Jeff Sessions made leak investigation a Department of Justice priority. But one man’s leak is another man’s whistleblower. And, with a few exceptions, like the leaking of classified information, whistleblowing is often encouraged, even legally protected.

A clash between America's most notorious labor union and the reality TV show Top Chef is coming to a head in federal court this week in a bizarre extortion trial that centers on allegations of nasty slurs and slashed tires. Federal prosecutors say four men from the Boston-based Teamsters Local 25 tried to extort staff on Bravo's wildly popular cooking series—including its star Padma Lakshmi...What remains to be seen is how jurors make sense of an ugly dispute between a local political force and a pop-culture institution—and the nuances of the labor laws in play. As Nancy Gertner, a former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law professor, put it, "The line between protected union activity and unprotected union activity is a fine line, and this case will be about that."

Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman convicted in June of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging a close friend, through text messages and phone calls, to commit suicide, was sentenced on Thursday to 15 months in a county jail. Ms. Carter was 17 in 2014 when the friend, Conrad Roy III, who was 18, poisoned himself with carbon monoxide in his truck...Some legal experts said the sentence seemed fair. “It recognizes this is an aberrant crime, a juvenile crime, a crime of social media, of the internet, and of the unique dramas of teenage boys and girls,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and a professor at Harvard Law School. “It deserves punishment, but you have to put it in context.”

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. The playbook was familiar. First came the over-the-top campaign attacks on sanctuary cities. Then the rushed executive order warning sanctuary cities that they will not get any federal money, at any time, for anything, unless they cooperate with federal immigration policies. Since the threat was so out of line with the Constitution, so inconsistent with the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches, let alone principles of federalism, it was immediately challenged. The Constitution vests spending powers in the Congress, and the Congress alone. It’s Congress that appropriates the money and sets conditions on its use. The president cannot just make up new rules for appropriated money.

A group of prominent lawyers is behind a new lawsuit filed Wednesday on behalf of Democratic donors against President Donald Trump and Roger Stone, who has advised Trump in an informal capacity. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, was organized by the nonprofit United to Protect Democracy. In addition to the Protect Democracy team, other lawyers include Keker, Van Nest & Peters partner Steven Hirsch, former federal judge and Harvard professor Nancy Gertner and Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan law school. All three are working on the case pro bono.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. The U.S. Supreme Court said most of President Trump's controversial travel ban could go into effect until the high court takes up the case in the fall. So it's at least a partial and temporary victory for the president to finally make good on a major campaign promise.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Governor Baker introduced a criminal justice bill in February to great fanfare. Designed to give prisoners incarcerated on mandatory minimum sentences access to good-time credit to hasten their release and to provide reentry programming, it received wide bipartisan support — as it should. The justification was clear. “Reducing recidivism,” Baker said, was the bill’s focus. The people of Massachusetts benefit “when more individuals exit the system as law abiding and productive members of the society.”

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Where do we draw the line between words and physical harm? That's what we're left wondering after the verdict in the Michelle Carter trial, announced last Friday. Twenty-year-old Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her friend to commit suicide in a series of texts. In his decision, Judge Lawrence Moniz cited the fact that Carter texted Conrad Roy III to "get back in" after he had left the truck where he planned to kill himself with carbon monoxide.

For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him. That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that had consumed New England, left two families destroyed and raised questions about the scope of legal responsibility...“Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, asked. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey gave two and a half hours of highly anticipated testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey was repeatedly asked about details revealed in his written testimony, submitted Wednesday. Specifically, he was asked why he took it upon himself to write memos of every visit and call he made with President Trump. "I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting," said Comey. "So I thought it really important to document." Comey also confirmed the serious nature of the Russian hacking in the 2016 election.

Former FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday that he believed President Trump was telling him he should drop the FBI’s criminal investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn during several private conversations between the two men. Comey testified that the president said he “hoped” Comey would “let this go,” asked him for his personal “loyalty,” and urged him to clear Trump’s name publicly from a broader probe into Russian election hacking...Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, spoke with the Gazette about the legal issues swirling around the matter.

Nancy Gertner, former U.S. federal judge, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether the pressure Donald Trump exerted to end the FBI investigation into Mike Flynn was merely awkward or actually illegal.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!" That was the tweet from President Trump this morning, following yesterday evening's news that the justice department has appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee its Russia investigation. The president may be fuming, but Congress issued a collective bipartisan exhale at the news. Amy Klobuchar, Democratic senator from Minnesota, called it "a breath of fresh air [that] has come into this week-long saga."

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and fellow Chiraag Bains. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Session instructed the nation’s 2,300 federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges in all but exceptional cases. Rescinding a 2013 policy that sought to avoid mandatory minimums for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, Sessions wrote it was the “moral and just” thing to do. Sessions couldn’t be more wrong. We served as a federal prosecutor and a federal judge respectively. In our experience, mandatory minimums have swelled the federal prison population and led to scandalous racial disparities. They have caused untold misery at great expense. And they have not made us safer.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. A Massachusetts judge has vacated the first-degree murder conviction of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez. He was convicted in the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd. Hernandez was found hanged in his prison cell last month. His death was ruled a suicide, which led to today's news that Superior Court Judge Susan Garsh has overturned Hernandez's conviction.