Katherine B. Forrest


Katherine Bolan Forrest is a partner at New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, and a former United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Early life, education and personal life

Katherine Bolan Forrest was born in New York in 1964 and grew up in Connecticut, one of six children. Her father, Richard S. Forrest, wrote mystery novels. Her mother, Mary Bolan Brumby, was a nurse. The family received food stamps for four years beginning when Katherine was 12. They were homeless for six months. "I came from nothing", Forrest said. "I came from a father who made no money. He was a playwright and then a writer, and even though he published a lot of books, I was a complete scholarship student all the way through."
Forrest attended Choate Rosemary Hall, a private school in Wallingford, Connecticut, on a scholarship, graduating in 1982. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in 1986 from Wesleyan University. She received her Juris Doctor in 1990 from New York University School of Law. She pursued a joint program at New York University that would have led to a J.D. and a Ph.D. in history, with an eye toward an academic career. Her focus shifted when she took a summer job at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP after her second year of law school. "I realized that commercial litigation was far more interesting than I thought it would be", Forrest said. She is the mother of two children.

Professional career

Forrest joined the New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore right out of law school in 1990, becoming a partner in 1998 and handling an array of commercial litigation with a particular focus on antitrust, copyright and digital media. She "was cited as being one of the country's leading practitioners in the antitrust and intellectual property arenas in Chambers USA 2007: America's Leading Lawyers for Business." Forrest was also cited by The American Lawyer as one of the top 50 young litigators in the U.S. and by Lawdragon as one of the leading litigators in the nation. In 2005, she was named in the Global Competition Review in the "40 Under 40" issue "as one of the top competition practitioners or economists worldwide." Forrest also was profiled in the GCR "as one of the top women antitrust practitioners worldwide." In 2010, Forrest represented United Airlines in winning approval for its merger with Continental Airlines. In October 2010, Forrest left Cravath when she was recruited by Assistant Attorney General Christine A. Varney to join the United States Department of Justice as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division.

Federal judicial service

On May 4, 2011, President Barack Obama nominated Forrest to fill a judicial seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York that had been vacated by Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who took senior status at the end of 2010. Forrest was nominated by Obama to the bench in May 2011 on the recommendation of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York. In her financial disclosures, Forrest said she was worth $4.3 million and that Cravath will continue paying her $380,000 a year for the next ten years. The U.S. Senate confirmed Forrest in a voice vote on October 13, 2011. She received her judicial commission on October 17, 2011. Forrest presided over several thousand cases, including more than 100 trials, and, in 2016, became chair of the Grievance Committee for the Southern District. On July 18, 2018, Forrest announced her retirement from the bench, effective September 11, 2018. After retiring from the federal bench, she returned to practice at Cravath, as a partner in the firm’s litigation department.

Significant cases

On May 16, 2012, in Hedges v. Obama, Forrest blocked enforcement of the National Defense Authorization Act's indefinite detention provision. The ruling came as part of a suit challenging the NDAA as infringing "free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution." Forrest's ruling was unanimously reversed by a Second Circuit panel on July 17, 2013.
In July 2013, Forrest ordered the release of $1.75 billion in foreign assets held by Iran’s central bank in a New York Citibank account to create a fund for families of the victims of the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marines compound in Beirut, Lebanon. Forrest’s ruling in Peterson v. Iran was upheld in 2016, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in Bank Markazi v. Peterson that the families should be allowed to collect the Iranian funds.
In August 2014, Forrest dismissed a price-fixing suit against Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Glencore. She held that, although the defendant's actions did affect the aluminum marketplace, the plaintiffs failed to show the defendants had intended to manipulate prices.
In 2015, Forrest presided over a jury trial in U.S.A. v. Ulbricht, where Ross William Ulbricht was accused of running the Silk Road online drug marketplace. She ruled that emoji are permissible court evidence. During the course of the trial, Forrest was doxed on 8chan, where her full mailing address, phone number, and Social Security number were posted on the baphomet subboard. In regards to the defense team's argument that Silk Road enhanced safety by moving illegal drug activity away from real life drug dealing scenarios, Forrest stated "No drug dealer from the Bronx has ever made this argument to the court. It's a privileged argument and it's an argument made by one of the privileged." Forrest sentenced Ulbricht to two life terms, plus another 40 years, without the possibility of parole. The Department of Justice then subpoenaed Reason Magazine regarding reactions in the comments section of its article on the sentencing.
From April 2016 to August 2017, Forrest presided over the civil lawsuit Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, in a case where notable YouTubers Ethan and Hila Klein, known on YouTube as h3h3Productions, were accused of copyright infringement by fellow YouTuber Matt Hosseinzadeh. In her decision, Forrest ruled in favor of Ethan and Hila Klein stating that the video in question accused of copyright infringement was "quintessential criticism and comment" of Hosseinzadeh's video and falls under the protection of "fair use". Hosseinzadeh's additional claims of DMCA misrepresentation and defamation were also dismissed. Additionally, in her ruling, Forrest made the note that while the Klein video may be classified as a "reaction video", not all reaction videos would fall under the fair use doctrine.
In January 2018, Forrest ruled that unlawful immigrants have a constitutional "freedom to say goodbye", barring a federal order to deport immigration activist Ravi Ragbir. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement criticized the court's opinion, citing a 2000 conviction of Ragbir for wire fraud.
In February 2018, Forrest ruled that Breitbart News, Heavy, Inc., TIME, Yahoo, Vox.com, Gannett Company, Herald Media, The Boston Globe, and New England Sports Network had violated the rights of Justin Goldman by embedding a link to a tweet of an image taken by Goldman of Tom Brady on their respective websites. Goldman claimed that he had the exclusive right to display the image and that he had not been contacted for a license for the photo nor that he had publicly released the photo. The photo was first posted to Goldman's Snapchat account.
In April 2018, Forrest sentenced former Mobile Messenger CEO Darcy Wedd to 10 years in prison for his involvement in a fraudulent mobile phone “auto-subscribing” scheme, after a jury convicted him in December 2017. The scheme charged mobile phone users millions of dollars in monthly fees for unsolicited and recurring text messages, without their knowledge or consent.

Return to private practice

Following her retirement from the federal bench, Forrest returned to practice in the litigation department at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. In 2019, she was named a “Notable Woman in Law” by Crain’s New York Business and profiled as one of Benchmark Litigation’s “Top 250 Women in Litigation”. Forrest is also an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, where she co-teaches a course on Quantitative Methods and the Law.
Forrest represented the Boston Red Sox in a proposed class action alleging that the Major League Baseball team had undermined fantasy sports contests by covering up sign stealing schemes in a case that was dismissed with prejudice in April 2020.