Last week, Fortune magazine featured U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff on its list of The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. In a sign of what Fortune’s editors think of the leadership skills of lawyers, he’s the only one on the list working in the legal profession, and he ranks number 50.
Still, it’s a good choice, and Rakoff should be proud. In particular, the magazine lauded him for breaking with tradition and rebuffing the Securities and Exchange Commission’s bid to let Citigroup settle charges of securities violations without admitting wrongdoing. At the risk of sounding like a nitpicker, that’s really not what he did. Instead, Rakoff refused to approve the $285 million Citi deal because he felt the parties didn’t give him enough information about the case (which involved the marketing of collateralized debt obligations) to determine if the proposed settlement was in the public interest.
