Federal courts trumpet steps to protect workers after #MeToo movement

The federal courts have taken “extensive” steps to protect workers from abuse, discrimination and harassment since the rise of the #MeToo movement, by creating more paths to report misbehavior and offering a new training session for in-house investigators, U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad Jr. said Wednesday.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which handles the judiciary’s administration, reported that the overall number of complaints against federal judges remains small, with just three brought by judiciary employees under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act in the last fiscal year. Many more complaints are handled internally, through mediation, court leaders said.

“In some ways, we have more of a middle management problem than a judicial problem,” said Conrad, who was named director of the Administrative Office earlier this year — pointing to statistics showing many complaints are not about judges per se but about other court employees.

However, some outside critics and former court employees say workers they’ve talked to don’t trust the internal system and don’t use it to report complaints, meaning any statistics are likely to be undercounted.

Conrad said the courts are making “steady, sustained” progress toward tearing down barriers to report misconduct for the 30,000 people who work in their buildings — from judges and their staff, to federal public defenders.

“This is not the systemic failure that some critics stuck in a six-year time warp have used to describe the judiciary’s efforts,” Conrad added. “The journey has not reached its destination, but we are committed and have demonstrated this commitment with concrete steps.”

Abusive conduct, retaliation complaints

The bulk of complaints against judges involve abusive conduct, the new report said, followed by allegations of retaliation against people who report problems.

In July, a federal judge in Alaska resigned after investigators found he engaged in a sexual relationship with a former clerk and created a hostile working environment in his chambers.

Aliza Shatzman, who interacts with many current and former federal law clerks through her Legal Accountability Project, said the people she talks with “have not and would not report misconduct” because they do not believe it would be taken seriously or investigated vigorously.

“(W)ith limited remedies available, no legal protection against retaliation, and, sadly, often no legal counsel to assist them, it is difficult to convince law clerks to stick their necks out and blow the whistle on misconduct,” Shatzman said. “Law clerks face enormous headwinds in reporting misconduct, and the federal judiciary does not make the process any easier.”

The quality of legal protections for judiciary employees have been hotly debated in Congress and reviewed in two separate audits this year. A pair of reports by the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Public Administration offered recommendations the judiciary continues to review.

Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat who has called on the judiciary to do more to shield workers from abuse, said in a written statement Wednesday that “deep concerns and significant questions” linger about the courts’ commitment to reform.

“Sexual assault and harassment are pervasive issues that demand substantive and urgent action, not rhetoric,” Torres said. “It is troubling to continue to see insufficient steps being taken to address the concerns raised by the House Appropriations Committee, and I will continue to closely monitor the judiciary’s efforts, or lack thereof, to protect the safety and dignity of all individuals, inside and outside the courthouse.”

Workforce survey not public

Torres is one of several critics who want to see the results of a national workforce survey the federal courts administered in 2023, but which is still not public. Judge Conrad said confidentiality concerns meant the findings would remain under wraps, but that administrators are assessing the survey results and would follow through early next year.

Court leaders emphasized that in some ways, their systems go beyond other offerings for federal workers, by, for instance, allowing people to report instances of hostile or abusive behavior. Conrad said the code of conduct for federal judges now prohibits abuse or harassment by judges themselves as well as failing to report “reliable” instances of potential wrongful acts they observe by others.

The Office of Judicial Integrity at the courts’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., has expanded to include three people, with two more expected to come on board. That office holds training for court systems nationwide. Since the federal courts operate in a patchwork, with different rules and management across a dozen or so circuit court systems, there are about a dozen more employees who handle workplace complaints spread out across the country.

The systems for reporting misconduct can be byzantine, and contribute to employees’ inability to find lawyers to help them navigate the process. Some auditors have recommended employees who bring complaints with merit should be able to recover attorney fees.

“I get that the judiciary is trying to do more to protect its workers,” said Gabe Roth, who fights for more transparency through his nonprofit group Fix the Court. “But there remain obvious reforms they appear to not even be considering, from ensuring mistreated staff have access to legal assistance to mandating workplace conduct training for judges and other managers, and these omissions do not instill a lot of confidence.”

Roth and other close observers of the federal courts said the internal system for resolving employee disputes remains rife with potential conflicts of interest, because a judge overseeing the dispute can work in the same courthouse as the judge who is the subject of a complaint.

The judiciary has said multiple ways to report complaints are meant to mitigate the problem of conflicts of interest.

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