Gertner told how she created a narrative for the court room that began with "the penis cakes and strippers," and ending up with this difference in her client's pay, and that her client felt compelled to leave (the firm) when she realized that these differences had been going on. "The judge didn't award us damages but awarded a quarter of a million in punitive damages," Gertner said.
When Gertner was interviewed by Senator Edward Kennedy for a court vacancy in 1994 she stood up at the end of the interview to leave but before doing so she told him, "'Senator, you know, I have a bone to pick with you.' And his staff members around him who were trying very hard to get me this job, went (gasp) what is she going to say now? And I said, 'Senator, just once you should reward a civil rights career. It doesn't have to be me, but just once reward a civil rights career.' And he didn't say anything but I'm told that that's actually what made the difference to him."
Gertner passed along copies of the glowing letters she had received from prosecutors that she had opposed in court. "You couldn't say that I had been underhanded or didn't have integrity." But the Boston Herald wrote an editorial comparing her to Lorena Bobbitt, which she paraphrased with the words, "Judge Gertner will do to justice with her gavel what Lorena did to her husband with a kitchen knife." The editorial, however, "scuttled my nomination temporarily...there was the b*tch metaphor that bore no relationship to the human being that I was." In the end, though, some horse-trading on the Senate floor enabled Senator Kennedy to push through Gertner 's nomination.
In her Comcast interview, Judge Gertner said she liked to hear cases that "made a difference." Perhaps the most prominent of these was the case brought against the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) by a number of men who had been imprisoned for 20 years because the FBI had cultivated an informant who accused them of a murder they didn't commit. "The premise of the law suit was that the FBI knew that he was lying and let him testify and, in fact, shored up his testimony and kept them from uncovering all of this. It's a really horrible tale."
Judge Gertner goes on to say that the case came before her which she heard alone without a jury and involved reading "thousands and thousands of pages of documents...You have to do it, and here the witnesses were these papers, so I wrote a lengthy decision awarding damages to them under the Federal Tort Claims Act, damages that were over $100-million and that was an extraordinary case." (That decision was handed down in July, 2006, and the $101.7-million sum was a record.)
Throughout her legal and judicial careers, it is fair to say that Nancy Gertner didn't "go along to get along" but hewed her own way and succeeded by dint of her hard work, innovative legal techniques and sheer chutzpah. As such, she has become a role model for women considering the legal profession as a career.
The broadcast "Educational Forum" is a presentation of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. The law school was founded in 1988 expressly for the purpose of providing a rigorous and practical legal education at an affordable tuition for students who would otherwise not be able to enter the legal profession. Through its companion television broadcasts, conferences and publications, MSLAW also serves the public by presenting information on the critical subjects of our times. #
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