WATERVILLE, Maine — The federal district judge from Massachusetts who wanted to Web stream a hearing in a case over the downloading of music from the Internet will be awarded the Morton A. Brody Distinguished Judicial Service Award at Colby College on Sunday.
Nancy Gertner, 63, of Brookline, Mass., also will give a lecture at 7:30 p.m. titled “The Internet Made Me Do It! Law and Technology in the 21st Century.” A panel Sunday afternoon will discuss a similar topic.
Gertner also will be awarded an honorary degree from Colby.
The award is named for former U.S. District Judge Morton A. Brody, who presided in Bangor for many years. Brody died in March 2000 at the age of 66. A longtime Waterville resident, he taught courses on the judicial system at Colby. His wife, Judith Brody, was the associate dean of admissions at the college for many years and a 1958 graduate.
“I am so touched by the decision to give me this award,” Gertner said Friday in an e-mail. “I knew Mort Brody personally. I knew his work, his accomplishments, but more importantly, experienced his courage and his extraordinary empathy firsthand.
“You don’t get graded as a judge,” she said. “[There’s] no win-loss ratio to calibrate how you are doing. An award like this, in honor of a man of this caliber, knowing what I know about him, moves me beyond words.”
Gertner was appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. A native of New York City, she attended Yale Law School with Clinton and his future bride, Hillary Rodham. Gertner did her undergraduate work at Barnard College during the turbulent 1960s.
After graduating from law school, Gertner went to work in Boston as a criminal defense lawyer. One of the people she defended was Susan Saxe, a graduate of Brandeis University who was tried in 1976 for participating six years earlier in robberies at a Massachusetts National Guard Armory and a bank in Brighton, Mass., where a Boston police officer was shot and killed. Saxe and others maintained the robberies were done to protest the Vietnam War.
Gertner succeeded in fighting the prosecution to a standstill, The Boston Globe said in 1994 in a long profile on the recently appointed federal judge. The jury could not reach a verdict on the murder charge. Saxe later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Over the past year, Gertner has been in the spotlight for her handling of a case over the illegal file sharing of music over the Internet. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston in April 2009 reversed Gertner’s decision to allow a motion hearing in the case to be streamed over the Web.
She also noted in a written ruling that she “was deeply concerned by [the music industry’s] rash of file-sharing lawsuits, the imbalance of resources between the parties, and the upheaval of norms of behavior brought on by the Internet.”
“Gertner has made no secret of her sympathy toward high school and college students who view file-sharing as a fact of life on the Internet and her distaste for the lawsuits that record companies have brought,” Jonathan Saltzman reported in The Boston Globe last year.
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock of Bangor will moderate the panel discussion on how technology is affecting the law and the courts. The panelists will be U.S. Bankruptcy Judge James Haines of Portland, Maine Attorney General Janet Mills, John Reinstein, an attorney for the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and Gert-ner’s husband, and Adam Liptak, the New York Times reporter who covers the U.S. Supreme Court.