Nancy Gertner

Today on Boston Public Radio: We began the show by opening phone lines, asking listeners about the large number of people in their 20s and…

Today on Boston Public Radio: We started the show by hearing our listener’s reactions to the news that NASA had successfully launched a satellite into…

Donald Trump’s legal woes are piling up left and right, and legal experts on Greater Boston said the former president’s luck is running out. Trump…

The Boston Globe – An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: A key theme of US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s opinion appointing a special master to…

Judge Nancy Gertner joined us for a session of “On the Docket,” in which she analyzed news about recent comments from Suffolk District Attorney candidate…

Judge Nancy Gertner weighed in on the ongoing investigations into former President Donald Trump, including fallout from the Jan. 6 committee hearings and the FBI…

The FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida resort and the removal of classified information raise a compelling need for maximum public disclosure given the involvement…

Retired Judge Nancy Gertner shared her thoughts on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s address on the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, unpacking some of the legal statutes involved…

Abortion may soon become illegal in some states. Politico on Monday night leaked a draft opinion penned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito suggesting the court will overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case legalizing abortion nationwide, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld abortion in 1992. The rare Supreme Court leak regards Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case surrounding a restrictive Mississippi abortion law. Judge Nancy Gertner, a retired judge for the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, said the news caught her off guard. “I was surprised by the venom of the decision,” Gertner said on Boston Public Radio. If the official ruling holds true to the arguments in the leaked document, it could have far-reaching effects beyond abortion. Gertner said she is worried about the broader legal implications, including what it means for birth control, interracial marriage and same-sex marriage. “The implications of that are enormous,” Gertner said. “The reasoning really casts doubt on 50 years of constitutional law.”

Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville opens with the death of Conrad Roy III (Colton Ryan). The 18-year-old’s body is discovered in his pickup truck in a Kmart parking lot. He has died by suicide. But questions soon emerge about the role a young woman named Michelle Carter (Elle Fanning) might have played in Conrad’s decision to end his life. ... “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, told the Times. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

Over and over again during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Biden nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republicans denounced the idea of “packing the Court”  by expanding the number of justices from nine to 13. But Wednesday’s decision rejecting Wisconsin’s voting maps and throwing the 2022 election process — which is already underway — into chaos, demonstrates that Republicans have packed the Court already. ... Former federal judge and Harvard Law School professor Nancy Gertner argues that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy has been undermined by Republican efforts to “manipulate its membership” and to roll back voting rights. Our democratic institutions are in crisis at every level. As Gertner puts it, “This is a uniquely perilous moment that requires a unique response.” Gerner favors expanding the U.S. Supreme Court to push back against the gathering threats to democracy.

An op-ed co-written by Nancy Gertner: It’s not that US senators are against all lawyers who defend clients, however savory or unsavory the clients may be. They had no problem confirming current US Supreme Court justices who defended large corporations for some of their careers (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). Nor was this an impediment to the confirmation of appellate judges. About 6 in 10 appellate judges are former corporate lawyers from large firms. Given this profile, it is no surprise, then, that the parties that appeared before the Supreme Court that were backed by the US Chamber of Commerce won 83 percent of the time in the most recent term.

Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s writings are again getting attention as he crafted a majority opinion and an alternative attached as a concurrence he said liberal colleagues could adopt en banc in the Second Amendment case. “You’re welcome,” he added, in a sarcastic aside. .. “It really undermines the relationships on the court,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in the District of Massachusetts and current professor at Harvard Law. “And you may not care about the relationships, but these are people who have to live together for some time.”

A former federal judge is calling for changes to how other judges think about sentencing, even as they face mandatory minimums and grapple with the sentencing guidelines. Nancy Gertner, who spent 17 years on the federal bench in Massachusetts, wrote in a new paper this week that the role of judges in sentencing has changed over the decades, particularly with the advent of mandatory sentencing guidelines. Those guidelines combined with laws requiring mandatory minimum sentences, she writes, have caused judges to feel more accustomed to handing down longer sentences—even when they have the discretion to do otherwise.

Persuading judges to wean themselves from the “habit of mass incarceration” is a critical step in transforming the American justice system, says former federal judge Nancy Gertner. Much of the focus on justice reform has been on changing the behavior of prosecutors and police, with judges often assumed to be above the fray, according to Gertner, former senior judge at the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and now a professor of practice at Harvard Law School. But in fact little headway is possible without the active engagement of judges willing to overcome deeply engrained resistance to changes in sentencing practices, Gertner wrote in a paper commissioned for the Executive Session on the Future of Justice Policy, part of the Columbia University Justice Lab’s Square One Project on reimagining justice. “The goal is to invite judges to reimagine what community safety really looks like, not with police, prosecutors, and exorbitant mandatory minimums—and the role that judges can play in facilitating it,” Gertner wrote in the paper released Tuesday.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: On June 30, 2020, the seven justices of the Supreme Judicial Court, including Chief Justice Ralph Gants, who tragically died months later, wrote an extraordinary letter to the legal community saying: “We must recognize and confront the inequality and injustice … of the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans, and challenge the untruths and unfair stereotypes about African-Americans that have been used to justify or rationalize their repression.” Only a year later, on December 22, 2021, in Commonwealth v. Sweeting-Bailey, the court’s majority ignored that plea.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has promised more charges to come against people who were part of the 2021 attack on the Capitol, while many continue to call for former President Donald Trump to be charged in the insurrection. Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss.

From systemic racism and inequity to Boston electing its first woman and person of color as mayor, 2021 brought us several stories that will continue to have an impact on our local communities in the coming year. Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Michael Curry, president and CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss the biggest local and national stories of the past year. ... "I don't think we can underestimate the impact of the change at the top," Gertner said, referring to the Supreme Court. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the bench, Gertner said, the court has taken on cases and positions based on personal interests, not precedent. "They have enabled gerrymandering. They have decimated the Voting Rights Act," she continued. "And they show every indication of being like that going forward."

Governor Charlie Baker is putting new pressure on the Massachusetts Legislature to finally pass his proposed crackdown on drugged driving, instead of letting the measure — initially filed in 2019 — again die in committee. ... “It’s junk science to the nth degree,” Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, said in an interview. “The Legislature has no business mandating who or what can be admitted into court — especially testimony that doesn’t meet evidentiary standards. It’s preposterous, and challengeable on any number of grounds.”