Margaret Garnett is a United States District Judge in the Southern District of New York, where she has served since January 2024.
Judge Garnett received her J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2000, an M.A. and M. Phil. In Political Science from Yale University, and a B.A. in English and Government from the University of Notre Dame. While at Columbia Law School, she was a Kent Scholar, served on the Columbia Law Review, and was awarded the James A. Elkins Prize in Criminal Law.
After law school, Judge Garnett was an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz from 2000 to 2004. From 2004 to 2005, she clerked for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch when he was a District Judge in the Southern District of New York. After her clerkship, Judge Garnett was an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York from 2005 to 2017, where she served in a variety of leadership roles including Chief of the Violent and Organized Crime Unit and Chief of Appeals for the Criminal Division. From 2017 to 2018, she was the Executive Deputy Attorney General for Criminal Justice at the New York Attorney General’s Office. From 2018 to 2021, she was the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation. In 2021, she returned to the U.S. Attorney’s Office as the Deputy United States Attorney, where she served until she was nominated to the District Court in 2023.