Judge Rakoff: A hot bench THE financial crisis has placed the muddled state of corporate law in America under intense scrutiny. Jed Rakoff, the judge in the current insider-trading case against Rajat Gupta, a former managing director of McKinsey, has emerged as an important player in this process. The 68-year-old judge is technically on "senior status" in the federal district court, meaning he can elect to work reduced hours. But there is nothing half-hearted about Mr Rakoff's approach. He is a powerful presence in a courtroom, and even more so in a string of recent opinions that underscore the contradictions in American regulation. In the current trial, Mr Gupta is alleged to have shared critical information gleaned from his board positions at Procter & Gamble and Goldman Sachs with Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager at the Galleon group who was convicted of insider trading last year and is serving an 11-year sentence. Since the Gupta case will be decided by a jury, Mr Rakoff is largely confined to the orchestral role of trial judge, although in his hands that is hardly a passive position. He has chided the lawyers when their presentations have dwelled on trivial details ("I am in awe of our jury for being attentive") or for infringing on jurors" base desires ("the fact that the jury is getting hungry should not deter you in any respect"). And when both the prosecution and defence have become befuddled by their own questions, he has stepped in directly to elicit testimony. Outside the confines of the courtroom, he has demonstrated a work ethic at least as rigorous as the bankers and consultants parading through the witness box, seeming to break only to watch the New York Yankees (which he encouraged jurors to do as well). In response to a tricky legal issue raised on a Friday, he requested that briefs from the opposing counsels be brought to his chambers on Saturday, and he delivered an opinion when the court reopened on a Monday. As the case began, opposing lawyers were required to submit by midnight definitions of insider trading, a notoriously murky area of law. Mr Rakoff's response came the next day. It was brief, clear and encompassing: insider trading is the intentional disclosure of material information in anticipation that it will be used for a trade in exchange for "at least some modest benefit." Whether this definition withstands the scrutiny of other courts may determine the case's legacy, regardless of the verdict. Perhaps because of his willingness to work long hours and grapple with areas of law that others have circumvented, Mr Rakoff has produced a remarkably large amount of work over the past five years - six times the number of opinions by another longtime judge in the same district, and more than double the number of several others, according to a crude analysis using Westlaw, a database. Many of these are drawn from high-profile cases. The most prominent recently was the rejection in November of a settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requiring a large fine but no admission of guilt. It is the kind of agreement judges have, in the recent past, rubber-stamped. Mr Rakoff's decision has been appealed against by both Citi and the SEC; in a preliminary ruling, a higher court suggested he may have overstepped. His opinion has, however, at the very least shone a bright light on the ability of the richest companies to avoid confronting unpleasant truths, a fundamental issue that the appeals court will have to confront if it is to produce a meaningful opinion. To let the punishment fit the crime The judge has ruled on numerous other cases that were only slightly less prominent. One, tied to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, involves the owners of the New York Mets baseball team, who were large Madoff investors. The key legal issue is the conflict between bankruptcy law, which would suggest any money received from Mr Madoff must be returned, and securities law, which does not. If the financial crisis persists, this sort of issue will become more pressing. Several other cases involve the expansion of responsibility. One is tied to Goldman Sachs's obligations (and by inference any broker's obligations) to mitigate the impact of the criminal activities of a client; another involves the responsibilities of Pfizer's board after the company was found guilty of selling prescription drugs for unapproved use in 2009. In yet another, concerning the 2011 conviction of the chief executive of MedSys, a hospital-management company, for paying three New York legislators, the definition of bribery itself is at issue (Mr Rakoff implies it is something done in anticipation of a benefit for a cared-about cause, rather than merely for a direct benefit). Beyond the legal meaning of his cases, Mr Rakoff, who early on worked as a reporter, provides an extensive narrative of the underlying facts in each one. These are often disturbing. Pfizer's malfeasance could cause anyone to look askance at for-profit health-care companies; his description of how public money is provided to health-care companies, a feature of the MedSys case, is at least as damning. Much has been made of Mr Rakoff's funny side. He wrote a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan's Major-General song from "The Pirates of Penzance" that ran in the Wall Street Journal and is now featured on his Wikipedia page: I laugh at all my judge's jokes, and listen to his endless spiel. I never pay the slightest heed to his reversals on appeal. And even in those moments when it looks like he has gone berserk, I smile and say, "More coffee, Judge?" - a perfect district judge's clerk. It is no doubt good politics to couch things in 19th-century rhymes. But to read Mr Rakoff's opinions is to see that his affinity for the absurdity of another era is rooted in what he sees today. Correction: The original version of this article wrongly gave Mr Rakoff's age as 81, rather than 68. This was corrected on June 7th. We apologise for the error.