Hon. Zahid Quraishi

Zahid Nisar Quraishi is judge of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey and a former US magistrate judge of the same court. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 1997, and his Juris Doctor from Rutgers Law School in 2000.

Legal Career
Upon graduating from law school, Quraishi served as a law clerk to Judge Edwin Stern of the New Jersey Superior Court from 2000 to 2001. From 2001 to 2003, he worked as a litigation associate at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae.

Judge Quraishi left his law firm in 2003 to join the US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, attaining the rank of captain, before being honorably discharged in 2007. During this time, Quraishi was stationed in Germany and deployed twice to Iraq in support of the Iraq War, both in 2004 and 2006.

In 2007, Quraishi became an assistant chief counsel in the Office of the Chief Counsel at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York City for approximately one year. He later became an Assistant US Attorney for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, from 2008 to 2013. Before becoming a judge, Quraishi was an attorney at Morristown’s Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Perretti LLP, and was a partner at the firm from 2016–2019. Quraishi taught courses on trial presentation at Rutgers Law School in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021.

Federal Judicial Service
Quraishi served as a US magistrate judge of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, a position he was appointed to on June 3, 2019, and left in 2021 upon becoming a district judge. He was the first Asian-American to sit on the federal bench in New Jersey.

In March 2021, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Quraishi to serve as a US district judge of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey to the seat vacated by Judge Peter G. Sheridan. Quraishi was recommended by Senator Cory Booker.
He received his judicial commission in June 2021.