A landmark report has shed new light on the deteriorating conditions facing federal judges across the United States, drawing on rare on-the-record testimony from sitting members of the bench.
NYU Law’s Rule of Law Lab and the Berkeley Judicial Institute jointly released a report titled Threats to the Independence of the Federal Judiciary earlier this month, based on interviews with 34 federal judges.
The interviews were conducted between October 2025 and July 2026, making the findings among the most current and comprehensive accounts of judicial life under sustained pressure.
The report arrived alongside a companion publication from the Brennan Center, part of a coordinated push to document what judges themselves are experiencing in their own words.
Its core finding reflects what many legal observers have tracked for years: escalating threats, intimidation, harassment, and disinformation are straining the federal bench and changing how the job gets done.
What sets this report apart from previous warnings is that judges, who almost never speak publicly about such matters, agreed to describe the environment on the record.
The tactics detailed in the report are deeply troubling, including swatting incidents, anonymous pizzas sent to judges’ homes as a way of signalling that their addresses are known.
Some of those deliveries were made in the name of Judge Esther Salas’s murdered son, a detail that underscores the targeted and personal nature of the harassment campaign.
Judge Ana Reyes was specifically told she should “eat a bullet” following an immigration ruling, one of many specific death threats catalogued in the report.
The Marshals Service tally of threats against federal judges continues to climb, with hundreds of judges now counted among those targeted by threatening communications.
Adding to the alarm is the response from senior figures at the Department of Justice, who have publicly labelled judges facing threats as “deranged” and “lunatics” while declaring war on what they call “rogue” judges.
As Judge Salas has pointedly noted, those same officials have remained conspicuously silent about the threats themselves, a silence that advocates say sends a deeply troubling signal.
Retired Judge Jeremy Fogel, who runs the Berkeley Judicial Institute and contributed to the report, emphasised the broader stakes for the legal profession, saying judges and lawyers alike have “a direct stake in an independent judiciary and in the rule of law.”
The coordinated release of both reports represents an unusual and deliberate effort to force a public reckoning with conditions that have too often been discussed privately but rarely documented at scale.
Legal experts warn that if the pressure on the federal bench is allowed to continue unchecked, the long-term damage to judicial independence and public trust in the courts could prove difficult to reverse.