Jed Saul Rakoff (born August 1, 1943) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He was appointed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, and assumed senior status in 2010.

Early life and education

Rakoff is Jewish and was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 1, 1943. He grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and attended Central High School of Philadelphia. Rakoff received his Bachelor of Arts in English literature from Swarthmore College in 1964, where he was student council president and editor-in-chief of the newspaper. He earned his Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in Indian history in 1966 from Balliol College at Oxford University, and received a Juris Doctor, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1969, where he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. He has received honorary degrees from Saint Francis University and from Swarthmore.

Career

After graduating from law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge Abraham Lincoln Freedman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1969 to 1970. Then, Rakoff spent two years in private practice at Debevoise & Plimpton before spending seven years as a federal prosecutor with the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. For the last two of those years, he was Chief of the Business and Securities Fraud Prosecutions Unit. He then returned to private practice, as a partner with Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Ferdon (1980–90) and then with Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson (1990–96). He headed both firms' criminal defense and civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sections.

Federal judicial service

On October 11, 1995, President Bill Clinton nominated Rakoff to fill a seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by David Norton Edelstein. He was confirmed by the Senate on December 29, 1995, received his commission on January 4, 1996, and entered on duty on March 1, 1996. On December 31, 2010, he assumed senior status, although he continues to take the full load of cases.

Rakoff has been a major feeder judge, sending more clerks to the Supreme Court than any other district court judge from 2011 to 2015 and numerous clerks thereafter.

Academic and foundation service

Rakoff is adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. He has taught there since 1988, teaching the first-year class in Criminal Law and seminars on White-Collar Crime, the Interplay of Civil and Criminal Law, Class Actions, and Science and the Courts. He is an adjunct professor at NYU Law School, where he teaches seminars on Class Actions and on Science and the Courts, and also teaches annual one-week seminars at The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and the University of Virginia School of Law. He previously served on the Board of Managers of Swarthmore College and on the Governing Board of the MacArthur Foundation's Law & Neuroscience Project. Rakoff was elected to the American Law Institute in 2009 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. He is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Rakoff represented the federal judiciary on the National Commission on Forensic Science (2013–17) and co-chaired the National Academies of Science's Committee on Eyewitness Identification. He served on the New York City Bar Association's Executive Committee and was chair of the Association's Nomination, Honors, and Criminal Law Committees. He chaired the Second Circuit's Bankruptcy Committee and the Southern District of New York's Grievance Committee and Criminal Justice Advisory Board. He participated in the development of the third and fourth editions of the federal judiciary's Manual on Scientific Evidence and co-edited The Judge's Guide to Neuroscience. He has assisted the U.S. government in training foreign judges in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Dubai, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, the Maldives, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sir Lanka, Tunisia, and Turkey. He was a senior advisor to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology's Advisory Group on Forensic Science and served as an adviser on the ALI project to revise the sentencing provisions of the Model Penal Code.

Since 2009, Rakoff has been a trustee of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, which sponsors research in U.S. legal history. Since 2020, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Touro Synagogue Foundation.

Rakoff's younger brother, Todd, is a longtime professor at Harvard Law School.

Visiting judicial service Throughout his judicial career, Rakoff has sat regularly by designation on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In addition, since 2011, he has regularly sat by designation on the Ninth Circuit,; retrieved September 19, 2012. Opinion by Rakoff.; retrieved September 19, 2012. Rakoff scheduled to hear 23 cases.; retrieved September 19, 2012. Rakoff scheduled to hear 16 cases. as well as occasionally on the Third Circuit. He has also occasionally sat by designation in the federal district courts of the Eastern District of California, the Middle District of Florida, and the Northern District of Oklahoma.

Travel ban

On April 13, 2013, Rakoff was on a list released by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) of Americans banned from entering the Russian Federation. The list was a direct response to the so-called Magnitsky list issued by the United States the day before.Ellen Barry, Russia Bars 18 Americans After Sanctions by U.S., The New York Times (April 13, 2013). Will Englund, Russia retaliates against U.S., bans American officials, Washington Post (April 13, 2013).

Recognition In 2011, Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone magazine, "Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time."Matt Taibbi,"Finally, a Judge Stands up to Wall Street", Rolling Stone, November 7, 2011.

In 2014, Fortune Magazine listed Rakoff as one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders.

In 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jessie Eisinger devoted two chapters of his book The Chickenshit Club to Rakoff, concluding that "Rakoff has cried out about the injustice of the [criminal law] system. He has played a role to change the way the country addresses corporate criminals."

In 2025, Rakoff was one of three judges profiled in Reynolds Holding's book Better Judgment: How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts.

Among other awards, Rakoff has received the Federal Bar Council's Learned Hand Award for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence (2018), the American College of Trial Lawyers' Leon Silverman Award for Distinguished Public Service (2021), and the World Jurist Association's Medal of Honor (2023).

Legal expertise

Speaking about the federal mail fraud statute while still a prosecutor, Rakoff wrote, "To federal prosecutors of white-collar crime, the mail fraud statute is our Stradivarius, our Colt .45, our Louisville Slugger, our Cuisinart—and our true love. We may flirt with RICO, show off with 10b-5, and call the conspiracy law 'darling,' but we always come home to the virtues of [mail fraud], with its simplicity, adaptability, and comfortable familiarity. It understands us and, like many a foolish spouse, we like to think we understand it."Jed S. Rakoff, The Federal Mail Fraud Statute (Part 1), 18 Duq. L. Rev. 771 (1980) Judge Rakoff also co-authored the civil volumes of Modern Federal Jury Instructions.

In addition to pushing back against what he has called the SEC's superficial punishment of companies accused of fraud and the failure of the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible, Rakoff has held the federal death penalty unconstitutional, sharply criticized U.S. sentencing guidelines, inserted himself into corporate governance reform at WorldCom, pushed for public release of documents, and written several of the leading decisions on insider trading.Louise Story, "Plain Talk From Judge Weighing Merrill Case", The New York Times, August 23, 2009.

Swarthmore, in conferring his honorary degree, noted that Rakoff is "broadly recognized as a legal thinker, scholar and judge who not only elucidates and enforces the law, but interprets, defends and challenges it in light of the principles of ethics and social justice that it is designed to serve" and that his opinions "are cited as models of intellectual clarity and judicial vision by lawyers and judges throughout this nation."

Rakoff is well known among lawyers for showing little patience with delays and moving cases along rapidly. He has said he feels bad taking lawyers and others to task, but he saw in private practice how delays and gamesmanship made the American legal system too slow and expensive for the average person. "The price of being a nice guy is too high—much too high—in terms of the system of justice", Rakoff added.

Notable cases

United States v. Quinones In 2002, Rakoff declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional, writing:

Opponents of capital punishment heralded his ruling. The New York Times called it "a cogent, powerful argument that all members of Congress—indeed, all Americans—should contemplate". But the decision was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, United States v. Quinones, 313 F.3d 49 (2d Cir. 2002).Benjamin Weiser, "A Legal Quest Against the Death Penalty; Chance of Error Is Too Great, Even for a Murder Victim's Brother", The New York Times, January 2, 2005. Before he found the death penalty unconstitutional in 2002, Rakoff says he suspected his ruling would be reversed because he knew a majority of the Second Circuit would interpret a Supreme Court decision on the issue, Herrera v. Collins, differently than he did."Judge Jed Rakoff: The Outtakes", Wall Street Journal Law Blog, November 9, 2011.

Aguinda v. Texaco

Rakoff presided over a class-action lawsuit against Texaco, brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act, by a class of Ecuadoreans, including several indigenous tribes, claiming that Texaco caused extensive destruction to the Oriente rainforest. He dismissed the case on forum non conveniens grounds, writing: "While reserving final decision on this motion, the Court is tentatively of the view that, if Ecuador provides an adequate alternative forum, it is the proper place to try these cases, with the Peruvian plaintiffs afforded the alternative of a Peruvian forum if they so prefer. Indeed, the voluminous record before the Court demonstrates that these cases... have everything to do with Ecuador and very little to do with the United States. Moreover, the notion that a New York jury (which plaintiffs have demanded) applying Ecuadorian law (which likely governs the claims here made) could meaningfully assess what occurred in the Amazonian rainforests of Ecuador in the late 1960s and early 1970s is problematic on its face". Rakoff's decision was affirmed on appeal, 303 F.3d 470 (2d Cir. 2002).

Motorola Credit Corp. v. Uzan Motorola Credit Corporation and Nokia brought suit against the Uzan family of Turkey. Rakoff found that the Uzans perpetrated multi-billion-dollar fraud in connivance with various corporate defendants, involving the making of numerous false statements designed to induce Motorola and Nokia to extend the loans in issue, diluting the collateral pledged to secure the loans, and filing false criminal charges in Turkey against plaintiffs' senior executives, claiming the executives engaged in "explicit and armed threat[s] to kill", blackmail, and kidnap members of the Uzan family. Rakoff awarded over $2.1 billion in compensatory damages and an equal amount in punitive damages.Motorola Credit Corp. v. Uzan, 274 F. Supp. 2d 481 (S.D.N.Y. 2003), affirmed, 388 F.3d 39 (2d Cir. 2004)

SEC v. WorldCom