Judiciary News

For nearly 20 years, the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been overcrowded. In 1996, court officials requested an expansion, and Congress eventually authorized $10 million to design a large annex building.

Jurors may spend weeks hearing disturbing testimony and viewing graphic evidence. Unable to talk with friends or family about the case, some jurors may experience what health care professionals call secondary trauma. Federal court judges are doing what they can to help jurors, even after the trial is over.

More than three decades after the Supreme Court’s landmark Fourth Amendment decision in New Jersey v. T.L.O., the public defender who represented the teen in the case explains how it still applies to students and school officials today. 

The federal Judiciary’s website, uscourts.gov, has a fresh look, improved functionality, and webpages that adjust automatically for optimal use on all sizes and types of devices.

U.S. District Judge Ellen Bree Burns, the longest-serving woman judge on the federal bench until she recently retired after 37 years, discusses her career in a newly released installment of “On Topic,” a U.S. Courts interview program

Bankruptcy filings for the 12-month period ending March 31, 2015, fell 12 percent when compared to bankruptcy filings for the 12-month period ending March 31, 2014, according to statistics released today by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. 

For federal courts, Law Day 2015 will be an opportunity to educate the public about the rule of law, inspired in part by the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, which established the principle that no man or government is above the law.

In order to adequately support the Constitutional and statutory mission of the federal courts, the Judiciary today asked Congressional appropriators to provide $7 billion in discretionary funding for fiscal year 2016, a 3.9 percent increase over the preceding year.

Representative Robert W. Kastenmeier “understood the federal courts like few others,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said in 1992. “More importantly ... his involvement served an important national interest.” Kastenmeier, who spent more than two decades as chair of the House subcommittee that had jurisdiction over the federal courts, died March 20 at the age of 91.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York had a room filled with files. That’s not unusual. Even though today most cases are filed electronically, case records have a way of accumulating over the years. But in less than five months, with the end of the fiscal year, the court needed to clear the room. The files had to go.

The Judicial Conference of the United States today voted to make a judge-specific workload report available for the first time over the Internet at no charge and also approved a courtroom sharing policy for magistrate judges in new courthouse and courtroom construction.

Reports on the 2014 caseload of the federal courts and the activities of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts were released today.

Federal courts have reduced the space they occupy and cut rent costs at facilities throughout the country, according to a report provided today to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

More than 4,000 visitors—including school groups, law school students, Boy and Girl Scouts, judges and international dignitaries—visited the St. Louis-based Judicial Learning Center in 2014, according to a report on the center.

It took nearly 140 years after the federal court system was established in 1789 before the first woman sat on a federal bench. Today, about one-third of all active Article III judges are women.