The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act 45 Years on—A Retrospective

Professor Arthur Hellman is the nation’s leading authority on the 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act and its administration. The statute and the federal courts’ implementing rules create a decentralized mechanism that allows anyone to file a complaint alleging judicial misconduct or performance-degrading disability on the part of any federal judge except Supreme Court Justices. Congress adopted the Act at the end of a decade of federal court innovations, and in response to examples of misconduct by federal judges and justices both. This Article assesses four aspects of the statute that were prominent in the debate over enactment and that remain unresolved: • whether there should be a mechanism for receiving and acting on misconduct and disability complaints about Supreme Court Justices; • the proper level of central oversight of the decentralized disciplinary system; • how to balance the values of transparency in, and access to, the system’s operation and judges’ legitimate expectations of privacy and protection from unfounded claims; and • the standards by which to assess misconduct and disability. The Article recognizes the limits on empirical measures of the Act’s effectiveness. It also notes widespread confusion between the Act’s disciplinary mechanisms and the federal judiciary’s advisory Code of Judicial Conduct. Ironically, however, pervasive but misinformed claims that lower court federal judges are bound by a mandatory code of conduct—confusing the advisory code with the Act’s mandates—provides the attentive public some assurance that there are means by which to hold federal judges to account for their conduct.