Today’s meeting of the Judicial Conference comes at a perilous time for the judiciary.

Concerns about political violence are on the rise in light of the tragic killing of Charlie Kirk, and the judiciary, like many other departments, is worried about being able to maintain its work protecting personnel as the threat of a government shutdown looms.

There’s a lot to cover in today’s semiannual press conference, and below are several questions we’re hoping the Conference answers for the press and public.

A dozen questions for today’s Judicial Conference meeting:

Security threats

1. Does the Kirk assassination portend a greater potential for violence against judges, and if so, how is the judiciary mitigating new threats?

2. How many threats have been made against federal judges during the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30? How many arrests related to judicial threats have been made during the current fiscal year?

3. Is the judiciary confident that the Trump administration is directing or will direct security resources toward protecting all judges who’ve been threatened, including those who’ve ruled against the administration?

Security funding and personnel

4. Assuming that Congress includes $58 million in supplemental funding for court security in the CR that the Trump administration has requested in light of the Kirk assassination, how will that money be spent? In other words, will it solely be directed to 24/7 coverage of the justices and their families, as some reports have said, or will it be part of the Marshals’ court security budget, which includes lower court protection?

Recall that in May, Fix the Court wrote to Congress calling for a $50 million security supplemental broken down by areas of greatest need, which includes lower court judges in light of the explosion of threats made against them.

5. How would the passage of the supplemental impact the court security topline? Even if some or all of the $58 million goes to the Marshals for protecting all of Article III, we’d still be far short of what the AO requested this year (and which House Appropriations passed earlier this month), $892 million.

6. Budget aside, does the judiciary believe there are enough human resources to handle judicial security — i.e., bodies in seats/on the beat — given the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of government (save ICE) on top of normal attrition rates? Has USMS or SCPD hiring slowed due to the substantial incentives being given to new hires at ICE?

CM/ECF & PACER

7. Is the judiciary confident that the CM/ECF breach announced over the summer has been patched and that the malicious actors who hacked the system are no longer still in it?

8. Should Congress introduce new Open Courts Act legislation that would create a single, modernized court records system with free public access to filings and dockets and improved security, will the judiciary work with lawmakers on the bill, or will it continue to actively oppose it?

Workplace conduct

9. In the Fourth Circuit’s August ruling in Strickland v. Moritz, the panel “decline[d] to reach the merits” of Strickland’s argument that “the exclusion of judiciary employees from the civil rights protections that Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] provides to other federal employees is unconstitutional.” Even so, an earlier panel for the first time recognized constitutional equal protection rights for judiciary employees. As such, does the judiciary still oppose legislation that would waive judiciary staff into the workplace conduct protections of Title VII?

10. It’s been 2.5 years since the judiciary put a branchwide climate survey on workplace conduct in the field. Are there plans for another such survey to go out soon, and if not, why not?

Ethics

11. As of this morning, only 30.6% of the judiciary’s 2024 financial disclosure reports (724 of 2,369) were uploaded to the online database. That’s a violation of the 2022 Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which says they must all be online (save for the roughly five percent of judges who ask for an extension) by mid-August. What changes, if any, are being made to ensure the judiciary meets its statutory deadline in future years?

12. Given the continued partisan nature of too many judicial junkets — on originalism or corpus linguistics or climate change litigation — does the Conference have any plans to ensure that, as required by some judicial codes, a diverse array of viewpoints is presented at all conferences for which judges are comped or reimbursed for travel, food and lodging? If not, why not?