Judge Nancy Gertner is a retired federal judge, appointed to the United States District Court (D. Mass) by President Clinton in 1994. She served on the court until 2011 when she retired to join the faculty at Harvard Law School where she is now a senior lecturer of law, instructing Law and Neuroscience and Sentencing and Mass Incarceration. While she was on the bench, Judge Gertner also taught sentencing and comparative sentencing institutions at Yale Law School. Prior to 1994, Judge Gertner was a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in and around the Greater Boston area at Silverglate, Shapiro & Gertner, during which she also taught at Boston University Law School and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Judge Gertner is a graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School where she was an editor on The Yale Law Journal, also receiving her M.A. in Political Science at Yale University.
In addition to teaching, Judge Gertner is the Managing Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Law Brain and Behavior. She is of Counsel at Fick & Marx LLP of Boston and Guttman Buschner PLLC of Washington, D.C. She was named one of “The Most Influential Lawyers of the Past 25 Years” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. Judge Gertner has received numerous awards, notably being the second woman to ever win the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award (the first was Justice Ginsburg). Judge Gertner has also won the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the American Bar Association Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Hennessey Award for Judicial Excellence, and the National Association of Women Lawyers’ Arabella Babb Mansfield Award. Additionally, she was a Commissioner on President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, and has written and spoken widely and prominently on various legal issues, with recent focus on the rule of law.
Judge Gertner’s opinion pieces appear regularly in the Boston Globe, WBUR’s Cognoscenti and occasionally the New York Times and the Washington Post. She also is a regular commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and WGBH’s “Jim Braude and Margery Eagan” show. Her autobiography, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate, was released on April 26, 2011. Her book, The Law of Juries, co-authored with attorney Judith Mizner, was published in 1997 and updated in 2010. She has published articles, and chapters on sentencing, discrimination, and forensic evidence, women’s rights, and the jury system. Her forthcoming book Incomplete Sentences, is a retrospective on her time on the bench, examining her personal experience of sentencing human beings and interviewing some of the men she sentenced.