Each year, without fail, some of the best litigators in private practice leave big-firm life for government service. Likewise, high-level government lawyers get invitations to join law firms, usually to defend the sorts of cases they once prosecuted. The phenomenon has plenty of vocal critics, who say it fosters a too-cozy relationship between regulators and their would-be targets. The practice also has its defenders, who claim it allows top talent to flourish both in and out of government.
Manhattan U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, a former federal prosecutor himself who’s not known to go easy on what he sees as lax government enforcement, recently downplayed the impact of the revolving door in an essay for The New York Review of Books. Rakoff maintains that the revolving door played little, if any, role in the paucity of prosecutions stemming from the financial crisis. He writes that “whatever small influence the ‘revolving door’ may have in discouraging certain white-collar prosecutions is more than offset, at least in the case of prosecuting high-level individuals, by the career-making benefits such prosecutions confer on the successful prosecutor.”
