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).
[16] He has assisted the U.S. Department of Commerce in training foreign judges in international commercial law in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia, Dubai, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
[24] 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.
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.
[29] 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.
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.
[34] 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.
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 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.
"[37] The reforms were implemented, and Rakoff later credited Breeden with "helping to transform a fraud-ridden company into an honest, well-governed, economically viable entity, MCI, Inc." Verizon purchased WorldCom in January 2006.
In November 2004, the Associated Press submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking unredacted transcripts of the Department of Defense's Combatant Status Review Tribunals' proceedings and related documentation.
He therefore ordered the Defense Department to release the unredacted transcripts (including the detainees' names) and related documentation[39] (AP v. United States DOD, 2006 U.S. Dist.
releasing the unredacted transcripts and related documents relating to those 317 detainees (of the approximately 500 at Guantanamo) who participated in Combatant Status Review Tribunals: "Forced by a federal court to lift the cloak of secrecy that had long shrouded the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon released thousands of pages of documents Friday containing names and other details for hundreds of detainees scooped up after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"[51] In 2005, Governor George Pataki of New York promulgated an executive order that allowed state-employed psychiatrists to effectuate the involuntary civil commitment—without any prior hearing or judicial determination—of sex offenders approaching the end of their prison terms.
[52] In an opinion and order dated July 8, 2010, Rakoff found that the government's actions "rather blatantly violated plaintiffs' constitutional rights"[53] (Bailey v. Pataki, 722 F.Supp.2d 443, 445 (S.D.N.Y.
The Second Circuit upheld Rakoff's ruling, agreeing that an official in the defendants' position would have known that the process by which plaintiffs were committed did not satisfy basic constitutional requirements (Bailey v. Pataki, 708 F.3d 391 (2d Cir.
The gist of the indictment was that Adelson joined a conspiracy, initially concocted by others, to materially overstate Impath's financial results, thereby artificially inflating its stock price.
But where, as here, the calculations under the guidelines have run so amok that they are patently absurd on their face, a Court is forced to place greater reliance on the more general considerations set forth in section 3553(a), as carefully applied to the particular circumstances of the case and of the human being who will bear the consequences.
The fine, if looked at from the standpoint of the violation, is also inadequate, in that $33 million is a trivial penalty for a false statement that materially infected a multi-billion-dollar merger.
"[60] The New York Times reported that "Taking a broad swipe at the Securities and Exchange Commission's practice of allowing companies to settle cases without admitting that they had done anything wrong, a federal judge on Monday rejected a $285 million settlement between Citigroup and the agency.
"[61] Rakoff wrote: "The SEC's long-standing policy—hallowed by history, but not by reason—of allowing defendants to enter into consent judgments without admitting or denying the underlying allegations, deprives the court of even the most minimal assurance that the substantial injunctive relief it is being asked to impose has any basis in fact."
He added that the agency's settlement policy creates substantial potential for abuse because it "asks the court to employ its power and assert its authority when it does not know the facts.
When the case went up on appeal, Rakoff, sitting by designation on the Ninth Circuit, wrote an opinion reversing the district court's grant of summary judgment for defendants and remanding plaintiffs' equal protection claim for trial (Arce v. Douglas, 793 F.3d 968, 977 (9th Cir.
Gupta, the former managing partner of McKinsey, served as a director on the boards of many major American businesses, including Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble.
At trial, prosecutors showed that Gupta, at the height of the financial crisis, leaked information about Warren Buffett's $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs to his friend Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund billionaire.
Indeed, within a minute of finishing a Goldman Sachs Board of Directors teleconference about the investment, Gupta phoned Rajaratnam at his Galleon Group office in New York.
2014), which had narrowed the definition of insider trading to situations where the government could prove that the tipper had received a direct financial benefit from the tippee in return for disclosing the information.
In August 2019, Rakoff sentenced Cesar Sayoc, nicknamed "The MAGA Bomber", to 20 years prison for the October 2018 United States mail bombing attempts.
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and a scholar at the Cato Institute, reported that he was the subject of death threats Sayoc made on Facebook in April 2018.
[74] Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie had also received a threatening tweet from Sayoc on October 11 that said: "Hug your loved ones real close every time you leave you home.