Please join the Stanford Rock Center for Corporate Governance in welcoming Judge Jed Rakoff, United States District Judge on senior status for the Southern District of New York, in this lunchtime discussion on his numerous leading cases involving the financial crisis, Bernie Madoff scandal, insider trading, and key criminal justice issues.

RSVP

Judge Rakoff has been called by the Los Angeles Times “the strongest voice on the bench for bringing Wall Street wrongdoers to justice.” Famously outspoken, he is the author of five books, 135 published articles, 600 speeches, and 1500 judicial opinions. He also writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.
Rakoff graduated with honors in English literature from Swarthmore College (B.A. 1964), earned his M. Phil. from Balliol College at Oxford University (1966), and received a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School (1969).
After serving as law clerk to the late Honorable Abraham Freedman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, 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 where he was a partner first with Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Ferdon, and then with Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. He headed both firms’ criminal defense and civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sections.
Judge Rakoff was nominated to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1995 and assumed senior status in 2010.  Since 1988, he has also been an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, teaching seminars on White Collar Crime, the Interplay of Civil and Criminal Law, and Science and the Courts. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as an Adviser on the ALI project to revise the sentencing provisions of the Model Penal Code. In July 2011 and August 2012, Rakoff sat by designation on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and Seattle, respectively.
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 over their alleged human rights violations. The list was a direct response to the so-called Magnitsky list revealed by the United States the day before. In 2014, Rakoff was listed by Fortune Magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.