Nancy Gertner

Professor of Practice

Appointments

• Visiting Professor of Law, 1985-86, 2011
• Judge, U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, 1994-2011
• Professor of Practice, 2011

Education

• Barnard College, Columbia University B.A. 1967, Political Science
• Yale University M.A. 1971, Political Science
• Yale University J.D. 1971

Biographical Statement

Judge Nancy Gertner is a graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School where she was an editor on The Yale Law Journal. She received her M.A. in Political Science at Yale University. She has been an instructor at Yale Law School, teaching sentencing and comparative sentencing institutions, since 1998. She was appointed to the bench in 1994 by President Clinton. In 2008 she received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, only the second woman to receive it (Justice Ginsburg was the first). She became a Leadership Council Member of the International Center for Research on Women the same year. In 2010 she received the Morton A. Brody Distinguished Judicial Service Award. In 2011 she received the Massachusetts Bar Association's Hennessey award for judicial excellence, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Brandeis University. She has been profiled on a number of occasions in the Boston Globe, the ABA Journal, Boston Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. She has written and spoken widely on various legal issues and has appeared as a keynote speaker, panelist or lecturer concerning civil rights, civil liberties, employment, criminal justice and procedural issues, throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. 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.

Research Interests

• Criminal Law
• Sentencing Disparity
• Jury Selection
• Constitutional Law
• Forensic Law
• Civil Rights
• Women's Rights
• Employment Discrimination
• Dispute Resolution
• Diversity Issues
• International and Comparative Law
• International Human Rights

Subject Areas for Accepting Press Inquiries

• Civil Rights
• Constitutional Law
• Criminal Case Strategy
• Forensic Evidence
• Jury Selection
• Sentencing

Subject Areas for Supervising Written Work

• Constitutional Law
• Employment Law
• Forensic Evidence
• Sentencing

Representative Publications

• Gertner, Nancy. "Juries and Originalism: Giving "Intelligible Content" to the Right to a Jury Trial," 71 Ohio State Law Journal 935 (2011).
  (paper given during a conference on Originalism and the Jury, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law)
  
• Gertner, Nancy. "From Omnipotence to Impotence: American Judges and Sentencing," 4 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 523 (2007).
  
• United States v. Green, 389 F. Supp. 2d 29 (D. Mass. 2005)(addressing the disparity in minority representation in the federal jury pool under both constitutional and statutory standards, overruled in In re U.S., 426 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2005) (NO. 05-2358) but then adopted as a D. Mass. court rule, cited in RE-JUSTIFYING THE FAIR CROSS SECTION REQUIREMENT: EQUAL REPRESENTATION AND ENFRANCHISEMENT IN THE AMERICAN CRIMINAL JURY, 116 Yale L.J. 1568, 1614 (2007); KATRINA JURIES, FAIR CROSS-SECTION CLAIMS, AND THE LEGACY OF GRIGGS V. DUKE POWER CO., 53 Loy. L. Rev. 1, 30 (2007); THE UNDERMINING INFLUENCE OF THE FEDERAL DEATH PENALTY ON CAPITAL POLICYMAKING AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE ADMINISTRATION IN THE STATES, 100 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 149, 211 (2010); SYSTEMATIC NEGLIGENCE IN JURY OPERATIONS: WHY THE DEFINITION OF SYSTEMATIC EXCLUSION IN FAIR CROSS SECTION CLAIMS MUST BE EXPANDED, 59 Drake L. Rev. 761, 798 (2011)).
  

Bibliography

View bibliography