Jed S. Rakoff has served since March 1996 as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York. He frequently sits by designation on the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals. Rakoff is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and NYU Law School, and also teaches at Berkeley Law School and the University of Virginia School of Law. He has written more than 150 published articles, 700 speeches, 1,800 judicial opinions and co-authored five books.
Following law school, he clerked for the late Judge Abraham L. Freedman, U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, and was then an associate at the Debevoise law firm. From 1973-80, he served as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York, the last two years as chief of business & securities fraud prosecutions. Before going on the bench, he was a litigation partner at two large law firms in New York.
Rakoff has served on multiple committees and boards including the National Commission on Forensic Science, the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Eyewitness Identification, New York City Bar Association’s Executive Committee, Swarthmore College’s Board of Managers and the Governance Board of the MacArthur Foundation’s Project on Law and Neuroscience. He assisted the U.S. government in the training of foreign judges in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia, Dubai, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
In 2014 he was listed by Fortune Magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.