At a meeting of New York City securities lawyers this week, Jed Rakoff did what he does best: challenge Establishment Thinking. “While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation — without jobs, without resources, without hope.” Then he asked: Who is to blame?

Rakoff is the iconoclastic U.S. District Court judge who’s been at the heart of some of the most significant trials stemming from the financial crisis. And what he really wanted to know is why more there haven’t been more criminal prosecutions of top financial executives (the very ones who, not coincidentally, made many of the people in his audience quite wealthy). To Rakoff the answer, clearly, is gun-shy federal prosecutors.  Why Are Financial Executives Not Prosecuted for Subprime Mortgage Fraud