The country’s leading federal judicial policymaking body urged Congress on Tuesday to approve 71 new lower court judgeships to ease mounting caseloads, which renewed a bipartisan push for additional seats after former President Joe Biden vetoed a similar effort last year.
The Judicial Conference of the United States, which develops policy for the federal courts, recommended that lawmakers create two new seats on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and 69 additional district court judgeships. The request follows a 30% increase in district court filings since 1990, while the number of authorized judgeships has risen by only 4% in the same period, according to a press release.
Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, a member of the Judicial Conference headed by the Supreme Court‘s Chief Justice John Roberts, said during a recent press conference that median case disposition times have worsened, rising from two years to 37 months.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Sutton said, adding that judicial leaders were focused on ensuring Congress takes action this time after last year’s failed effort.
The last time Congress enacted a significant expansion of the federal judiciary was in 1990, when it added 85 new judgeships through the Judicial Improvements Act, a bipartisan effort signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush. Since then, workloads have increased dramatically and led to growing delays in case resolution. The number of civil cases pending for more than three years has jumped 346% in the past two decades, according to the Judicial Conference.
U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad, director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, described Biden’s veto as “extremely disappointing” in a letter addressed to Biden on Dec. 16.
“The president’s veto will contribute to the pattern of growing caseloads and increasing backlogs that hurt litigants and weaken public confidence in our courts,” Conrad wrote in a statement at the time.
Sutton said that during the conference’s biannual meeting on Tuesday, there “was not a discussion of what went wrong” last time and noted that “there was definitely a discussion of how we can make things go right this time around.”
Unlike progressive calls in recent years to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court, which have been viewed as part of a political effort to shift the ideological balance of the high court, adding lower court judges has long been a bipartisan priority among judicial advocates. Expanding district and circuit courts is widely accepted as necessary to keep up with increasing caseloads. However, Supreme Court expansion, which is often dubbed “court packing,” has been criticized as a partisan power grab.
The 118th Congress previously passed the JUDGES Act with bipartisan support to address the shortage and earned endorsements from the Federal Judges Association and Federal Bar Association. However, at the last minute, Biden vetoed the bill over concerns that it would create new seats in districts where Republican senators blocked Democratic nominees and possibly allow then-President-elect Donald Trump to fill more seats.
Due to these concerns, lawmakers have historically backed legislation that would add new judges based on a staggered approach to ensure no single president gets the opportunity to confirm all of the new judgeships that would be created.
Efforts to renew the bill are already underway. Last week, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, on a nearly party-line 16-11 vote, signed off on a new version of the JUDGES Act that, if passed, would mark the largest expansion of the judiciary since 1990.
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In a Reason blog post, Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, suggested that a staggered approach to creating new seats over eight years could help mitigate partisan concerns.
“That is what Congress tried to do last year,” Adler said. “We will see if they try again.”
