When U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff accepted the Stanley J. Fuld Award from the New York State Bar’s commercial and federal litigation section in January, he didn’t regale attendees with yarns from his 17 years on the bench.
Instead, Rakoff took the opportunity to heap praise on judges in Iraq. "The judicial system in Iraq is one of the relatively few success stories of the postSaddam Hussein era, and that has made it a target of al-Qaeda," he said in an interview with The American Lawyer last month. During the speech, he noted that in recent years, as many as 49 Iraqi judges have been assassinated. Medhat al-Mahmoud, Iraq’s chief justice, has survived two assassination attempts, and the second-ranking judge of the Iraqi International Commercial Court, Judge Jabbar Al-Lami, was shot 13 times, mostly in the head and chest, two years ago. Miraculously, he survived.
