Raymond J. Lohier Jr. supervised federal investigations involving Bernard Madoff and Marc Dreier before becoming an appellate judge. He worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York from 2000 to 2010, serving as deputy chief and chief of its Narcotics Unit and then in the same leadership roles on its Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. His responsibilities included cases concerning insider trading, securities fraud and Ponzi schemes. The Second Circuit's biography also lists his oversight of the Galleon Group insider-trading prosecutions among his work in that office.
Born in Montreal in 1965, Lohier graduated from Harvard College in 1988 with a concentration in philosophy. He earned his law degree at New York University in 1991, edited the Annual Survey of American Law and received the law school's Vanderbilt Medal. His early career included a clerkship with Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr. of the Southern District of New York from 1992 to 1993. He then practiced at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton from 1993 to 1997.
Lohier moved into federal civil-rights enforcement in 1997. At the Justice Department, he worked on employment-discrimination matters in the Civil Rights Division. The Federal Judicial Center records his service as a trial attorney from 1997 to 2000 and as a senior trial attorney beginning in 1998. He joined the federal prosecutor's office in New York in 2000, bringing that civil-enforcement experience into the criminal practice he would pursue for the next decade.
President Barack Obama nominated Lohier to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on March 10, 2010. The Senate confirmed him on December 19, and he received his commission the following day. He became the court's chief judge in 2026 and a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States that year.
Lohier has also worked on legal scholarship and university governance. He joined the American Law Institute in 2013 and its Council in 2014, advising projects on employment law, organizational compliance and policing. In May 2026, the institute presented him with its Distinguished Service Award. At Harvard, he joined the Board of Overseers in 2021 and chaired its committee on arts and humanities. The board elected him president for the 2026 to 2027 academic year, a role involving the university's system of external academic review.
