News and Announcements

"Congratulations, you are all United States citizens.” With these simple words, a federal judge welcomed new citizens as part of a series of naturalization ceremonies held in recent weeks at professional baseball stadiums across the country. A new U.S. Courts video captures the momentous occasions with interviews of new citizens about what it means to be an American.

Like many  of the 23 women judges who transformed the federal Judiciary in 1979, Susan Harrell Black was encouraged by her father to have professional aspirations—but for a darkly practical reason.

Two of America’s most memory-laden traditions, the welcoming of new citizens and baseball—have come together this year to create a sense of community and diversity at stadiums across the country.

Law school students and graduates who filed applications for federal court clerkships and staff attorney positions from June 7 to Aug. 31, 2019 using the OSCAR system may have to refile some documents in their applications.

Judge Anne Elise Thompson never had specific career goals, and never imagined she would be part of a historic class of women judges appointed to the federal bench in 1979.

Multiple federal courthouses in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia are closed due to the effects of Hurricane Dorian.

Four Supreme Court Fellows are set to begin their fellowships for the 2019-2020 term in September.

Judge Rya Zobel, of the District of Massachusetts, joined a historic class of 23 women who in 1979 transformed the federal Judiciary. In a group of pioneering women lawyers, her journey to the federal bench was perhaps the most remarkable.

In 1979, Mary Murphy Schroeder joined a historic class of women judges who transformed the federal Judiciary, but her law career nearly ended before it began. The night before her first final law exam at the University of Chicago, Schroeder collapsed and was hospitalized with a severe kidney infection.

In 1979, 23 women were appointed to the federal bench—more than doubling the number of women appointed to life-tenured judgeships in the previous 190 year history of the United States. The doors they opened never swung shut again. Forty years later, women make up one-third of the courts’ full-time, active Article III judges.