Hon. Nancy Gertner (Ret.) served on the United States District Court for the district of Massachusetts from 1994 to September 2011, presiding over thousands of complex cases and earning the respect and admiration of counsel and parties who appeared before her. She was voted by Massachusetts Lawyer’s Weekly readers as the “best” federal judge in Boston and has received numerous local and national awards, including the ABA’s Thurgood Marshall Award. Prior to her appointment to the bench, Judge Gertner gained a reputation as one of the most talented trial lawyers in the nation, representing both plaintiffs and defendants in high profile civil cases and defending criminal matters.
Throughout her career as a trial lawyer and judge, she has been a prolific scholar, writer, and law teacher. She has taught at Yale, Harvard, Northeastern, Boston College, and Boston University Law Schools and has published broadly in the areas of discrimination, evidence, the jury system, sentencing, and the judicial system. Her most recent books, The Law of Juries (2010, with Judith Mizner) and In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate, (2011) have received widespread critical acclaim.
Judge Gertner has retired as of September 1, 2011, joining the faculty at Harvard Law School. She is available for arbitration, mediation, and other neutral assignments, particularly those involving complex commercial issues, reinsurance, false claims, intellectual property, as well as civil rights litigation, through Resolutions, LLC.