News and Announcements

The 12 regional Courts of Appeals are playing an outsized role in helping the federal Judiciary to achieve its five-year goal for reducing courthouse and office space.

Recent scams in federal courts in South Carolina and Virginia are typical of the fraudsters.

Representatives of the federal Judiciary today asked Congress to provide $7.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2018 to fund the continuing operations of the judicial branch, as well as to enhance cybersecurity, adequately provide for funds for counsel for indigent defendants, and to ensure sufficient security at federal courthouses.

A recently enhanced database that houses information about civil and criminal federal cases dating to 1970 is now available to researchers and the public on the Federal Judicial Center’s website as part of a partnership with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

In the first months after Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Atsushi Wallace Tashima’s life wasn’t much different from that of other young Americans. Like others in his ethnically mixed Los Angeles neighborhood, Tashima’s family draped their windows at night, to protect against America’s new wartime enemies. But the Tashimas soon were branded, solely because of their ethnic heritage, as potential spies and saboteurs. By presidential order, 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were uprooted from their homes, and shipped off to internment camps.

In a concerted effort to make it easier for people to serve as jurors, the federal Judiciary is embracing technologies aimed at reducing wait times, paperwork, and trips to the courthouse.

The first week of May is Juror Appreciation Week. In observance of that event, two educational videos about federal jury service are available.

A decline in the number of federal prosecutions and in the severity of sentences for drug-related crime in recent years has resulted in a significant drop in the federal prison population, according to statistics from the Judiciary, the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

In 1903, the Wright Brothers’ made aviation history when they flew their airplane in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They then made legal history in numerous federal patent lawsuits, raising fundamental questions about how far inventors can go in using patent law to ward off challengers.  

In calendar year 2016, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied 9 applications in full and 26 applications in part. Learn more about the 2016 Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts on Activities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts.