Top 14 Jed S. Rakoff Quotes

It’s very hard to uphold individual liberty when the person you’re representing is often a crook.

In baseball you have individual responsibility, and if you fail it, you get an error. But at the same time, your focus is on the common goal of the team to win. This is part of what resonates with people about baseball. This is how they would like society to work.

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 think it’s common sense to say that the longer away from a crime it gets prosecuted, the less deterrent effect there is.

If you prosecute a CEO or other senior executive and send him or her to jail for committing a crime, the deterrent effect in my view vastly outweighs even the best compliance program you can put in place.

When I was a kid, and for many years after, I was your classic afraid-to-dance-type person.

In my experience, most federal prosecutors, at every level, are seeking to make a name for themselves, and the best way to do that is by prosecuting some high-level person. While companies that are indicted almost always settle, individual defendants whose careers are at stake will often go to trial.

I have huge respect for Preet Bharara, a great U.S. Attorney by any measure. But even great men can make mistakes.

Judges have to be neutral, but they don’t have to be eunuchs.

I’ve never been impressed with bureaucratic tradition. I don’t like it when the parties come to me and say, ‘This is the way that it’s always done, judge.’ I never found anything in the oath I took or the statutes I was asked to look at that said, ‘Judge, stop thinking, because this is the way it was done before.’

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.

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.

One of the many things I like about baseball is how it combines individual talent and teamsmanship.

Everything needs to be public. The legitimacy of the courts comes from the fact that they reason openly, on the record, based on facts.