Nancy Gertner

Judge Nancy Gertner is senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. In September 2011, she retired from the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, to which President Clinton appointed her in 1994, and became part of the faculty of the Harvard Law School, teaching a number of subjects including criminal law, criminal procedure, forensic science, and sentencing, as well as continuing to teach and write about women’s issues around the world. Gertner is a graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School, where she was an editor on The Yale Law Journal and later an instructor teaching sentencing and comparative sentencing institutions. She received her M.A. in political science at Yale University. She has been profiled on a number of occasions in The Boston Globe, the ABA Journal, Boston Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. 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 is continuously updated. She has published articles and chapters on sentencing, discrimination, forensic evidence, women’s rights, and the jury system. She is presently working on a judicial memoir focused on sentencing entitled Incomplete Sentences (Beacon Press, forthcoming), a collection of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions, and a legal treatise on sentencing.