Spotlighting “F 16 IMPECCABLE
JUDGMENT Judge Nancy Gertner BY PATRICK FOLLIARD
Throughout her extraordinary career as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer, federal judge, and now a professor at Harvard Law School, Nancy Gertner has demonstrated a fiery passion for justice. Whether that means arguing landmark women’s rights cases, making controversial decisions, or carving out time to approve eleventh hour deportation injunctions, she has always worked hard to ensure that “justice for all” is more than a catchphrase.
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or anyone who went to Yale Law School in the late 1960s and early ‘70s like me, the question to ask is ‘How could you not have believed in social and civil justice?’ It
was in the air. It was exciting and we thought we were changing the world. It’s where we learned to be critics, to look underneath things and question everything.” During her years on the bench from 1994 to fall of
2011, when she retired from the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Gertner enjoyed compli- cated, puzzle-like cases, but she especially liked the cases that were important but not heavily lawyered up. “Tose are the ones that don’t scream. Often with a petition writ- ten in pencil; sometimes the language isn’t the best. Tey usually go unnoticed. Tough woefully underrepresented, these types of cases are important and need attention.” Judge Gertner was well known for caring about immi-
gration. It was common on Friday afternoons for someone who was going to be deported on Monday to come to the court seeking an injunction. “My clerks knew I cared about these kinds of cases and when the person appeared at the counter downstairs they knew I could be inter- rupted to deal with it—more cases that didn’t scream.” Despite, or because of, her ongoing interest in the little
guy, Gertner invariably landed center stage. Te decision she issued on Limone v. FBI that awarded more than $100 million to the victims of FBI misconduct drew con- siderable attention. So did the decision she wrote on affir- mative action in connection with Lynn Public Schools, Comfort v. Boston, which upheld the use of race-conscious methods for K-12 school assignments. She frequently expressed frustrations with Massachusetts’ method of jury selection in federal cases, a method that led to white juries, and registered her concerns about the rigidity of the federal sentencing guidelines. She was also the first federal judge to blog. “Te whole blogging [criticism] was really overblown,” she says. “I blogged for Slate for awhile, and I never wrote about pending cases or criticized other judges. Te extraordinary criticism of judges in the past 20 or 30 years makes judges feel they must bend over backwards to not deal with the media. Writing a blog is not different from an op-ed or any article that judges are permitted to comment on.” Gertner never set out to be a judge. In fact, almost every move she made in her career as an outspoken, firebrand
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