Category: federal courts

Federal judiciary warned of effects of budget shortfall

A press release from the U.S. Courts highlights concerns that Congressional inaction on the federal budget will leave the federal courts about $800 million short of what they need to operate in the coming year.

The judicial branch has requested $9.4 billion in discretionary funding for Fiscal Year 2026. (If that sounds like a lot, consider that the discretionary budget for the Department of the Interior alone was nearly double that amount for FY2025, and the judiciary is an entire branch of government.) However, the requested amount is hardly assured. If Congress chooses to operate under another full-year continuing resolution for the coming year instead of passing a new budget, the courts would expect to receive only $8.6 billion, a nearly 10% shortfall in requested funds.

More limited appropriations could hurt the federal courts’ implementation of courthouse security and cybersecurity measures, IT modernization, and funding attorneys for indigent defendants. The new Fiscal Year starts October 1.

Federal Judges Association condemns attacks on the judiciary

The Federal Judges Association, a voluntary organization of federal judges, issued a statement on Wednesday condeming the recent attacks and threats against the federal judiciary on social media and elsewhere.

Many recent attacks have been fueled by judicial determinations that certain Trump Administration policies either violate federal law, or should be enjoined from going into effect until their legality can be determined. Such actions, commonplace in the courts for centuries, have incurred the wrath of Elon Musk and others. They have called for the impeachment (or worse) of many extremely respected judges — calls that are foolish at best, and verging on politically obscene.

The FJA’s statement sets out what any decent high school civics class should teach:

Specific decisions issued by judges are not formed from individual opinions, but rather are prepared against evaluation of what the ‘laws on the books’ require….

The security of federal judges and all those serving in the judicial branch of our government is fundamental to their ability to uphold the rule of law, and to fulfill their constitutional duty without fear or undue influence. Any erosion in the independence of the judiciary is a threat to our Constitution and to democratic rule of law. Ensuring judicial security is not just about protecting individuals, it is about preserving the integrity of our legal system and the public’s trust in an impartial judiciary.

Judges must be permitted to do their jobs without fear of violence or intimidation of any kind.

Yes.

House reintroduces JUDGES Act

The JUDGES Act, a bill that would have added 66 new federal judgeships over ten years, received bipartisan support in the last Congress before it was coldly vetoed by Joe Biden in the waning days on his presidency. This blog took Biden to task for a petty act of partisanship, denying a co-equal branch of government its basic needs just because an opposite-party president would have the opportunity to fill the first tranch of judgeships.

Rep. Darrell Issa has now reintroduced the Act, aiming at adding the same 66 new judgeships as before. And as before, Democrats are playing games. Representatives like Jamie Raskin, who certainly should know better, will continue to delay the legislation and punish the judiciary for no viable reason.

The bill worked its way out of committee on a party-line vote, but it’s hard to be optimistic that the courts will get this much-needed influx of judges anytime soon.

Trump Administration considering sale of courthouses and other federal judicial buildings

This week the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages most federal buildings, released a list of federally owned properties that it would consider closing and selling off as part of the new administration’s cost-cutting measures. The list included approximately 20 federal district courthouses, which are owned and maintained by the GSA and leased to the judiciary. It also includes other offices used by court adjuncts, like probation and pretrial services, as well as immigration and bankruptcy courts (which formally fall under the Article I authority of the U.S. Congress).

The list was released on Tuesday and then removed from the GSA’s website the next day. But those who saw familiar buildings on the list are not happy. Most prominently, both of Minnesota’s Senators wrote a letter opposing the proposed closure of the federal courthouse in Fergus Falls.

How this will ultimately play out is anyone’s guess. But it is an excellent illustration of the courts’ resource dependence. The judiciary is a coequal branch of government, yet it does not own or control its own courthouses or equipment, cannot hire its most important employees, and has virtually no mechanism for raising money on its own. The courts must be especially nimble in managing these dependencies, especially in fraught political times.

Colorado judges discuss the pros and cons of AI

This is an interesting article on a recent panel discussion in Colorado, in which state and federal judges shared the courts’ emerging views on generative AI with the rest of the legal community. It is clear that, like the rest of us, courts are struggling to achieve the right balance between AI as an impermissible shortcut and AI as an efficient game-changer.

And AI can absolutely be that game-changer for written materials. Current iterations of AI tend to write in a dull and wooden style, at least for legal work. But short motions and briefs can be drafted in a matter of seconds (and polished within minutes), rather than taking hours to draft and revise. And the output is grammatically correct and readable, which is a huge plus. Thoughtful use of AI in written submissions might alleviate the problems that stem from the notable decline in younger lawyer’s writing skills.

It seems that we are headed in the direction of treating AI like a paralegal or inexperienced attorney — eventually its use will be explicitly permitted, but failure to confirm all the details will be an ethical violation in itself. Stay tuned.

Did everyone miss the point of the Chief Justice’s Year-End Report?

Per tradition, Chief Justice John Roberts quietly released his 2024 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary on New Year’s Eve. Each year’s report briefly expounds on a single theme before concluding with a high-level statistical summary of the federal court’s work. The report typically garners relatively little attention, but this year was different. Some talking heads are convinced that the report is a direct jab at Donald Trump or J.D. Vance, or at least a warning to the country of the dystopian future heading our way on January 20. Others have suggested the report is an exercise in hypocrisy by a politicized Supreme Court that is unwilling to face criticism. Even the more dispassionate analyses have concluded that the report is, at its core, a condemnation of threats to judges or a call to protect judicial independence.

All of these have missed the point. The Year-End Reports are always terse, cautious, and carefully written, and the Chief Justice almost never directly states his views in full. One has to look for the hints. And this year the hints point to a real, if deliberately understated, concern about the erosion of respect for the rule of law and the country’s democratic institutions.

Continue reading “Did everyone miss the point of the Chief Justice’s Year-End Report?”

The courts are still in Phase I of their relationship with AI — but change is coming

This week, the Colorado Court of Appeals issued its first opinion cautioning litigants about relying on generative AI to draft legal briefs, joining a number of other courts that have similarly warned (and sometimes sanctioned) parties and lawyers for including “bogus” AI-generated case citations. 

Judicial pushback against the errors caused by ChatGPT and other early publicly available AI models is sound policy, no different than teachers balking at AI-generated student essays. The AI programs currently available to the public can be astonishing in their creativity, but are also prone to hallucination and more often than not produce a mediocre result. Professor Ethan Mollick has compared such programs to a tireless but clumsy intern — eager to please and lightning fast, but lacking polish, sophistication, or accountability to reality. So it is natural that the courts’ first priority is to put out the fire of fake case citations.

But one should not confuse legitimate concerns about flawed AI today with pessimism about the transformative power of AI going forward. AI’s large language models are learning very quickly, and a rapid influx of users will spur even more rapid development. Legal research services like Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw have introduced their own first-generation AI services, which aim to connect more rigorously to actual legal precedent. It will not be long before legal research is indeed faster, better, and more thorough than ever before — a change akin to the introduction of electronic legal databases in the 1980s.

The courts, too, are not too far off from embracing AI for their own purposes. In Phase II, judges and court staff will rely on AI to read briefs and transcripts, summarize arguments, check citations, and even produce questions for oral argument. In Phase III, they will use AI to draft opinions and orders, initially in low-stakes cases (to help with the workload) but eventually in high-stakes, complex litigation. In Phase IV, AI itself will hear the case, render the decision, and draft an order or opinion.

Phase IV may feel futuristic, but it is coming, and sooner than we think. State courts in particular are contending with a massive increase in self-represented litigants — individuals who have real legal problems but who cannot (or choose not to) pay a lawyer to help guide them through the system. Many have cases that are legally straightforward (such as a basic contract dispute) and may be willing to submit those cases to an AI “judge” with the promise of a quicker and less expensive resolution. As AI improves, such judging programs eventually will be available on demand and from the comfort of one’s own home, no different that the modern telehealth industry. They may start as private, ADR-style offerings that compete with courts for customers, but eventually court systems themselves will feel pressure to embrace the same technology.

Of course, courts will not move into AI judging lightly, and nothing will happen until the courts are convinced that whatever system they employ can guarantee an accurate application of existing law, preserve the guarantees of due process, and protect confidentiality as needed. But we are on cusp of a major technological transformation that could benefit resource-starved courts and decision-starved parties in equal measure.

Media bias and collateral damage to the courts

One of the primary themes of court system interdependence is resource dependence — the idea that courts rely on outsiders to provide some of the key resources they need to operate. Those resources include not only quantifiable goods like money, judges, and courthouses, but also “soft” resources like fair, accurate, and unbiased reporting about the courts and their activities. When the media fails to provide this core resource, public trust in the courts can suffer.

Two recent examples demonstrate the problem.

Continue reading “Media bias and collateral damage to the courts”

New information on threats to federal judges

Jason Leopold of Bloomberg News has unearthed fascinating, and highly distressing, details on some of the more than 2,300 threats that were made against federal judges (including Supreme Court Justices) in 2022 and 2023 alone. The details come from a FOIA request to the US Marshals Service, and reflect investigative reports after the threats surfaced.

In some instances, threats were just examples of idiots blowing off steam. Some were generally angry about a particular court decision. But others were far more serious, including allegations of a hitman plot against a Supreme Court justice and another suspect who appeared to have planned to attack an assistant public defender.

House votes to add 66 new federal judgeships; will Biden veto?

This week, the House of Representatives comfortably passed the JUDGES Act (S.4199), which would add 66 federal judgeships over the next ten years. The judgeships would be phased in over ten years, with the first two tranches coming in 2025 and 2027.

The Senate passed the same bill back in August, but House Republicans stalled a vote on the bill until after the election. Now that Donald Trump will return to the White House, the House Democrats decided that it was their turn to play politics with the judiciary and slow-played the vote until mid-December.

This is an excellent result for a resource-starved judiciary. But it appears that the drama will continue for a while, as President Biden has threatened to veto the bill on his way out the door. It’s worth unpacking the illogic and petulance of his threat.

Continue reading “House votes to add 66 new federal judgeships; will Biden veto?”