Professor

Nancy

Gertner

Hon. Nancy Gertner is a retired federal judge who served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts from 1994 to 2011, appointed by President Clinton. A former civil rights and criminal defense attorney in Boston, she is now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, where she teaches courses on Law and Neuroscience and Sentencing and Mass Incarceration. She previously taught at Yale and Boston University Law Schools and holds degrees from Barnard College and Yale University, including a J.D. and an M.A. in Political Science. Judge Gertner is the Managing Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Law, Brain and Behavior and is of counsel at Fick & Marx LLP and Guttman Buschner LLP. She served on President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court and is a frequent contributor to national media, including CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. She is the author of In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate and co-author of The Law of Juries. Her forthcoming book, Incomplete Sentences, is a reflection on her years on the bench, including interviews with men she sentenced. Among her many honors, she was the second woman to receive the ABA’s Thurgood Marshall Award and is also a recipient of the ABA’s Margaret Brent Award and the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Hennessey Award for Judicial Excellence.