Katherine B. Forrest

Katherine Bolan Forrest (born February 13, 1964) is a partner at New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison 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 many 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 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. The American Lawyer also cited Forrest 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 (GCR) in the "40 Under 40" issue "as one of the top competition practitioners or economists worldwide." Forrest was also profiled in the GCR "as one of the top women antitrust practitioners worldwide." In October 2010, Forrest left Cravath when Assistant Attorney General Christine A. Varney recruited her to join the United States Department of Justice as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division. Obama nominated Forrest to the bench in May 2011 on the recommendation of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York. The U.S. Senate confirmed Forrest in a voice vote on October 13, 2011. She received her judicial commission on October 17, 2011. After resigning from the federal bench, she returned to work as a firm’s litigation department partner at Cravath.

Significant cases In 2012, in Hedges v. Obama, Forrest issued a permanent injunction that blocked enforcement of Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorized the president to order the military to indefinitely detain any person deemed to be a member of, or to have provided substantially support to, "al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces." The plaintiffs in the suit challenged the 2012 NDAA provision as a violation of the First Amendment's right to free speech and free association and the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. In 2013, a Second Circuit panel unanimously reversed Forrest's ruling, holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing.

In In re Aluminum Warehousing Antitrust Litigation (2014), Forrest dismissed an antitrust (price-fixing) suit against Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Glencore. She held that, although the defendants' 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 United States v. Ulbricht, where Ross William Ulbricht was accused of running the Silk Road online drug marketplace. During 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 regard 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 an additional 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. In her ruling, Forrest also noted that while the Klein video may be classified as a "reaction video," not all reaction videos would fall under the fair use doctrine.

In Ragbir v. Sessions (2018), Forrest ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to halt the deportation of Ravidath (Ravi) Ragbir, an immigrant from Trinidad who had become an activist in the United States. Ragbir became a legal permanent resident in 1994 but had been convicted of wire fraud in 2001; it was uncontested that, since being released, Ragbir had been rehabilitated and had "lived a life of a redeemed man."

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 he had the exclusive right to display the image and had not been contacted for a license or 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 resignation 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 dismissed with prejudice in April 2020.