Judiciary News

A pilot project giving the public free, text-searchable, online-access to court opinions now is available to all federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.

As has happened from the earliest years of the nation, members of the U.S. Supreme Court took part in this year’s Jan. 21 inauguration ceremony, and their participation is documented in the accompanying photo slide show.

Earlier this month, Chief Judge Catherine D. Perry, of the Eastern District of Missouri, swore in U.S. Representative Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), in a ceremony at the Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse in St. Louis.

Federal court statistical profiles for the nation’s 12 regional appeals courts and 94 district courts for fiscal year 2012, the 12-month period ending September 30, 2012, are newly available.

With the swearing-in this week of President Obama, U.S. Presidents have taken the oath of office 65 times in our nation’s history, and a federal jurist has administered that oath on 62 of those occasions.

A few days after the federal Judiciary’s Digital Video Pilot Project began in July 2011, the Western District of Tennessee recorded the first courtroom proceeding, a preliminary injunction hearing in a defamation case.

The Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure is asking for comment on the first proposed modernization of bankruptcy forms in two decades.

Focusing on efforts by the federal courts to contain costs, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has issued his "2012 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary."

In late October and early November, courts in New York, New Jersey and other Eastern Seaboard states were shut down by Super Storm Sandy. This account, by Chief Judge Loretta A. Preska, describes the challenges faced by the Southern District of New York in putting its courts back in order.

Pronouncing himself “humbled,” Judge Thomas F. Hogan, Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, has received the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award, but he cautioned in remarks that America's federal judges are “nearing a crossroads.”

Celebrating Bill of Rights Day, students in a newly released two-minute video talk candidly about the rights and freedoms they value most and are guaranteed in this seminal document.

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Denny Chin, a Chinese immigrant who grew up in a Hell's Kitchen tenement, is the subject of a newly released Pathways to the Bench video profile, the eighth in a video series in which federal judges talk about challenges that helped prepare them to serve justice.

Every four years, U.S. courts play a little-known role to help ensure that the Electoral College votes are received in Washington and properly counted.

According to data released this month by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, immigration cases were the fastest growing segment of cases in the federal system for which an offender was sentenced in fiscal year 2011. Until fiscal year 2009, the most common federal crime had been drug-related.

"Bring your body bags," was the message left by an offender on a probation officer’s cell phone. "I’ll kill you and your family," another offender wrote an officer from prison after his probation was revoked.