The Wall Street occupiers had been chased out of Zuccotti Park a couple of weeks earlier, but you could hear the echoes of their frustration in a dramatic ruling issued just a few blocks away on Nov. 28, 2011. The opinion, by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, rejected a settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Citigroup Global Markets. In doing so, Judge Rakoff directly challenged the practice of negotiated settlements—the primary mechanism for resolving corporate regulatory violations.
The proposed settlement, he wrote, was not reasonable, fair, adequate or in the public interest, for the central reason that it leaves the facts of a particularly egregious chain of allegations shrouded in ambiguity.
