José A. Cabranes

José Alberto Cabranes (born 1940, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico) is a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A former general counsel of Yale University, he was appointed to the District of Connecticut by Jimmy Carter in 1979 and to the Second Circuit by Bill Clinton in 1994, and from 2013 to 2020 sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, presiding over it from 2018. Between 2019 and 2025 he sat on five Second Circuit panels in the litigation arising from Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell: the unsealing appeals in Giuffre v. Maxwell and Maxwell's criminal appeal in United States v. Maxwell.¹

Career

Cabranes moved from Puerto Rico to the South Bronx at the age of five. He graduated from Columbia University in 1961 and Yale Law School in 1965 and took a master of letters in international law at Cambridge (Queens' College) in 1967. He practiced law in New York from 1967 to 1971, taught at Rutgers Law School from 1971 to 1973, and from 1973 to 1975 was special counsel to the Governor of Puerto Rico, Rafael Hernández Colón, and head of the governor's Washington office. From 1975 to 1979 he was general counsel and director of government relations of Yale.¹

Carter nominated him on November 6, 1979 to the District of Connecticut seat vacated by Jon O. Newman; he was confirmed on December 5 and commissioned on December 10, 1979, the first Puerto Rican appointed to an Article III judgeship in the continental United States. He was chief judge of the district from 1992 to 1994. Clinton nominated him on May 24, 1994 to the Second Circuit seat vacated by Richard J. Cardamone; he was confirmed on August 9 and commissioned on August 10, 1994. He served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which hears the government's appeals from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, from 2013 to 2020, as its presiding judge from 2018. He assumed senior status on March 9, 2023.¹

The Epstein and Maxwell Panels

On March 11, 2019 a panel of Cabranes, Rosemary S. Pooler and Christopher F. Droney issued an order to show cause in Giuffre v. Maxwell (No. 18-2868) on the unsealing of the summary judgment record, on the appeals of the Miami Herald and its reporter Julie K. Brown and of Alan Dershowitz and Mike Cernovich. A printout of the order from Bloomberg Law, time-stamped "3/11/19, 5:28 PM," is among the documents released from Epstein's own files.²

The same panel heard argument on March 6, 2019 and decided Brown v. Maxwell; Dershowitz v. Giuffre on July 3, 2019 (929 F.3d 41). It wrote that "we recognize the potential damage to privacy and reputation that may accompany public disclosure of hard-fought, sensitive litigation," and ruled: "we VACATE the District Court's orders entered on November 2, 2016, May 3, 2017, and August 27, 2018, ORDER the unsealing of the summary judgment record as described further herein, and REMAND the cause to the District Court for particularized review of the remaining sealed materials." Pooler concurred except as to ordering immediate unsealing without remand. The summary judgment record, about 2,000 pages, was unsealed on August 9, 2019. Epstein was found dead in the Metropolitan Correctional Center the next morning.³⁴

On October 19, 2020 a panel of Cabranes, Pooler and Reena Raggi affirmed by summary order Judge Loretta Preska's July 23, 2020 order unsealing Maxwell's April 2016 deposition, three months after her arrest.⁵

On September 17, 2024 a panel of Cabranes, Richard C. Wesley and Raymond J. Lohier Jr., which had heard argument on March 12, 2024, affirmed Maxwell's conviction and 240-month sentence (118 F.4th 256). It held that "the NPA did not bar Maxwell's prosecution by USAO-SDNY," applying United States v. Annabi (1985) for the rule that a plea agreement binds only the U.S. Attorney's office for the district in which it was made unless it "affirmatively appears" to reach further, and concluded: "Identifying no errors in the District Court's conduct of this complex case, we AFFIRM the District Court's June 29, 2022, judgment of conviction."⁶

On July 23, 2025 a panel of Cabranes, Raggi and Myrna Pérez decided the consolidated appeals of Virginia Giuffre and the Herald per curiam (146 F.4th 165). It held that "a judicial document determination is properly made by evaluating the relevant materials at the time of their filing with the court," and vacated "the district court's December 2019 and January 2020 Orders in their entirety," the orders that had set Preska's unsealing protocol.⁷