Jed
S. Rakoff is a United States District Judge for the Southern District
of New York. He graduated with honors in English literature from Swarthmore
College, earned his M. Phil. from Balliol College at Oxford University,
and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School.
After clerking for the Honorable Abraham Freedman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, he spent two years in private practice before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. He spent seven years with the Office, the last two as chief of business and securities fraud prosecutions, before returning to private practice.
Judge Rakoff is also a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. He is a leading authority on the law of white-collar crime, and has authored many articles on the topic, as well as leading treatises on RICO and corporate sentencing.
In 2002, in United States v. Quinones, Judge Rakoff declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional. Although the decision was subsequently reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, his opinion’s recognition of the possibility that an actually innocent person might be executed was heralded by the New York Times as “a cogent, powerful argument that all members of Congress – indeed, all Americans – should contemplate.”
