Words matter. These are the best Jed S. Rakoff Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now know.
The price of being a nice guy is too high – much too high – in terms of the system of justice.
Judges have to be neutral, but they don’t have to be eunuchs.
An application of judicial power that does not rest on facts is worse than mindless, it is inherently dangerous. If its deployment does not rest on facts – cold, hard, solid facts, established either by admissions or by trials – it serves no lawful or moral purpose and is simply an engine of oppression.
I have a past of making a fool of myself.
It’s very hard to uphold individual liberty when the person you’re representing is often a crook.
When I was a kid, and for many years after, I was your classic afraid-to-dance-type person.
I don’t have any respect for judges who arrive at the result first, and then try to figure out some way they can bend the law to reach their particular predilections.
Once I really got into securities fraud prosecutions, I came to realize how central they were to the maintenance of a free market and how, in many ways, they are far more important to the welfare of our society than many of the more sensational criminal cases that one hears about.
I was always attracted to taking a novel position, but one grounded in the materials I’d been given, not made up out of whole cloth.
I think it’s common sense to say that the longer away from a crime it gets prosecuted, the less deterrent effect there is.
Everything needs to be public. The legitimacy of the courts comes from the fact that they reason openly, on the record, based on facts.
Why should the court impose a judgment in a case in which the SEC alleges a serious securities fraud, but the defendant neither admits nor denies wrongdoing?
Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do. And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent.
If, in the name of combating terrorism, we so restrict our own freedom, have we not thereby lost part of the very battle we seek to win?
