National Association for Presiding Judges and Court Executive Officers

ABA survey: Most think U.S. democracy is weaker

Democracy in the United States is weaker today than it was five years ago, and most people blame misinformation, disinformation and the political parties, according to a new national survey conducted for the American Bar Association. The 2024 ABA Survey of Civic Literacy asked if democracy today is stronger or weaker than it was five years ago, who is mainly responsible for safeguarding our democracy and whether respondents are concerned about the upcoming November election. It also tested respondents’ knowledge of the U.S. government.

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Effective Leaders Articulate Values — and Live by Them

Individuals are often unsure about what constitutes a “value.” When asked to delve deep into personal moral codes and what it means to hold certain standards and ideals, people struggle to clearly convey what they believe and how their actions reﬂect these beliefs. In truth, we have found that people don’t spend much time thinking about what they stand for unless they face a crisis — by which point, they are unprepared to properly evaluate the possible trade-offs among competing values or the long-term consequences of decisions.

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Artiﬁcial Intelligence: A path to shorter workdays or the demise ofhuman viewpoint?

This article is a recounting of a panel discussion entitled “Why BOTher Writing” that took place on November 23, 2023, at an educational gathering at the Appellate Judges Education Institute Summit in Washington DC. The panelists included appellate lawyer Mark Davies, Washington and Lee University School of Law Professor Joshua Fairﬁeld, Thomson Reuters Senior Vice President for Product Development Emily Colbert, and Judge Herbert B. Dixon, Jr., (ret.), Superior Court, District of Columbia. The interchange largely focused on “ChatGPT,” an A.I. program with the ability to respond in full text to a question posed by a user.

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ABA President Mary Smith Letter in Support of Judicial and Court Security

Our courts and judges are under attack. Serious threats against federal judges have doubled since 2021, with 457 serious threats targeting federal judges across the country in 2023. National leaders and private citizens are making false statements and scurrilous accusations against judges for partisan, personal gain. These attacks are no idle matter. Often, they involve threats of physical harm or death — not only to the judges but also to their families and staff.

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Retired U.S. Justice Breyer discusses new book in interview with ABA Journal

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism, came out Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Randy Maniloff, an attorney at White and Williams in Philadelphia and an adjunct professor at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, recently interviewed Justice Breyer about the book.

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Legal innovation and generative AI: Lawyers emerging as ‘pilots,’ content creators, and legal designers.

With gen AI, so much of the lawyering that we’re used to doing manually will be easily automated and readily available for our adoption. For many, that’s a scary thought and leads us to wonder if it makes what we do less important or relevant. My perspective is the exact opposite: I see this as a tremendously exciting time in our profession, because the best use of this newly emerging automation stack can free up real time that lawyers use on heavily time-consuming work with lower payof. It releases that time to let us do more creative, tailored, and innovative work that will allow us to ramp up our expertise and craft unique value.

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What Were They Thinking?: Musings of a Jury Deliberation Process

I’ve worked at the NCSC for over 30 years with most of my career focused on the topic of jury system management and jury trial procedure. During this time, my perspectives have mostly been informed by the professional views of judges, lawyers, court administrators, and academics. Only occasionally did I interact with actual jurors. At best, I could only imagine myself in their place when thinking about policies and practices that would benefit the institution of trial by jury. This changed this week when, much to my surprise, I was selected as a trial juror in a criminal case in my local court.

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