Katherine B. Forrest

Katherine Bolan Forrest
Katherine Forrest in her court room
Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Incumbent
Assumed office October 17, 2011
Appointed by	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Jed S. Rakoff
Personal details
Born	Katherine Bolan Forrest (1964-02-13) February 13, 1964 (age 53) New York City, New York
Education	Wesleyan University B.A. New York University School of Law J.D.

Katherine Bolan Forrest (born February 13, 1964) is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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 including the Lyon and Bea Wentworth mystery series. Her mother, Mary Bolan Brumby, a nurse, cared for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The family received food stamps for four years beginning when Forrest 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. Forrest 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 law degree and a doctorate 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. Forrest is married to New Zealand native Sean Baldwin, a partner with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, and is the mother of two children.

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 (GCR) 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 October 2010, Forrest left Cravath to join the United States Department of Justice as a deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division.