Judges Under Siege: Threats, Disinformation, and the Decline of Public Trust in the Judiciary

Thomas B. Griffith was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit by President George W. Bush in 2005. He retired from the D. C. Circuit in 2020 and is currently Special Counsel at the law firm of Hunton Andrews Kurth and a Fellow at the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University. In 2021 President Joe Biden appointed him to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A graduate of BYU and the University of Virginia School of Law, Judge Griffith was a litigation partner at Wiley, Rein and Fielding in Washington, D. C., prior to being named Senate Legal Counsel of the United States. In that capacity, he represented the interests of the Senate in litigation and advised the Senate leadership and its committees on investigations, including the impeachment trial of President Clinton. Prior to his appointment to the D.C. Circuit, Judge Griffith was the General Counsel of Brigham Young University. He has long been active in rule of law projects in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
 

Paul W. Grimm is the David F. Levi Professor of the Practice of Law and Director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School. From December 2012 until his retirement in December 2022, he served as a district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, with chambers in Greenbelt, Maryland. From 1997 to 2012, he was a magistrate judge in the same court, serving as chief magistrate judge from 2006 through 2012. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has served as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law and the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, where he taught courses on evidence and discovery. He also has written extensively and taught courses for lawyers and judges in the United States and around the world on topics relating to e-discovery, technology and law, and evidence. Judge Grimm served on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure from 2009 to 2015 and chaired its discovery subcommittee, which crafted, in part, the 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. He graduated with an A.B. (with highest honors) from the University of California–Davis in 1973. He received his J.D., magna cum laude and Order of the Coif, from the University of New Mexico in 1976, and an LL.M. (Master of Judicial Studies) from Duke University in 2016. Judge Grimm served both on active duty and in the Army Reserve as a Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer and retired in the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Nathan L. Hecht is the 27th Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court. He has been elected to the court six times, first in 1988 as a Justice, and most recently in 2014 as Chief Justice. He is the longest-serving Member of the court in Texas history and the longest-tenured Texas judge in active service. Throughout his service on the Court, he has overseen revisions to the rules of administration, practice, and procedure in Texas courts, and was appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States to the federal Advisory Committee on Civil Rules. He is also active in the court's efforts to assure that Texans living below the poverty level, as well as others with limited means, have access to basic civil legal services.

Chief Justice Hecht was appointed to the district court in 1981 and was elected to the court of appeals in 1986. Before taking the bench, he was a partner in the Locke firm in Dallas. He holds a B.A. degree with honors in philosophy from Yale University, and a J.D. degree cum laude from the SMU School of Law, where he was a Hatton W. Sumners Scholar. He clerked for Judge Roger Robb on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve Judge Advocate General Corps. He is President of the national Conference of Chief Justices, a Life Member of the American Law Institute and a member of Council, and a member of the Texas Philosophical Society.

David F. Levi is the Levi Family Professor of Law and Judicial Studies and director emeritus of the Bolch Judicial Institute. He was the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of Duke Law School from 2007-2018. Following his tenure as dean, Levi served as the founding director of the Bolch Judicial Institute from 2018 until 2022. He also served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States in 2021.

In 2023, he was appointed to the Data Protection Review Court (DPRC). The DPRC independently reviews determinations made by the Civil Liberties Protection Officer of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to qualifying complaints sent by individuals through appropriate public authorities that allege certain violations of United States law in the conduct of United States signals intelligence activities.

Before becoming the 14th Dean of Duke School of Law in 2007, Levi was the Chief Judge for the Eastern District of California with chambers in Sacramento. Earlier in his career, he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Levi was then nominated in 1990 to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California by President George H.W. Bush. 

After law school, he clerked with Judge Ben C. Duniway of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then with Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States.

In 2007, Levi was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2010 to 2014, he served on the Equal Justice Works board of directors. In 2014, he was appointed chair of the ABA’s Standing Committee on the American Judicial System, and in 2015, he was named co-chair of the North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice. He served as a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States in 2021.

Levi was elected to The American Law Institute in March 1991, serving as an Adviser on the Federal Judicial Code Revision, Principles of the Law, Aggregate Litigation, and Principles of the Law, Student Sexual Misconduct: Procedural Frameworks for Colleges and Universities projects. He was elected to the Council in October 2005 and became ALI's 10th President in May 2017.

Bridget Mary McCormack is President and CEO of the American Arbitration Association-International Centre for Dispute Resolution. She is also a Strategic Advisor to the Future of the Profession Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Until the end of 2022, McCormack was Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, a position her peers selected her for in January 2019 after she served for six years as a Justice. While on the Court, she championed innovation and the use of technology to improve access to justice.

A graduate of New York University Law School, McCormack started her legal career in New York City. In 1996, she joined the Yale Law School faculty. She then joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty in 1998, where she taught criminal law, legal ethics, and numerous clinics. She was Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs from 2002 until 2012.

McCormack was elected to The American Law Institute in 2013. The Attorney General of the United States appointed her to the National Commission on Forensic Science in 2014. In 2019, the Governor of Michigan named her Co-Chair of the Michigan Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration. In 2020, she joined the American Bar Association’s Council on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar and currently serves as Vice Chair. In 2021, the Governor of Michigan asked her to co-chair the Michigan Task Force on Forensic Science and to chair the Michigan Jail Reform Advisory Council. She also chaired the Michigan Judicial Council, the strategic planning body for the judicial branch. In 2021, McCormack was also appointed to serve nationally on The Council of State Governments Healthy States National Task Force and the ABA Center for Innovation’s Governing Council. She was also named Chair of the ABA Board of Elections.

McCormack is an Editor of the ABA’s preeminent publication, Litigation Journal. She speaks and writes frequently about access to justice, innovation in the legal profession, and legal education.

McCormack is married to Steven Croley, General Counsel and Chief Policy Officer at Ford Motor Company. They have four adult children.

Suzanne Spaulding is senior adviser for homeland security and director of the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She also serves as a member of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Previously, she served as undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where she led the National Protection and Programs Directorate, now called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), managing a $3 billion budget and a workforce of 18,000 that is charged with strengthening cybersecurity and protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election infrastructure. Ms. Spaulding has worked in the executive branch in Republican and Democratic administrations and on both sides of the aisle in Congress. She was general counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and minority staff director for the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She also spent six years at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she was assistant general counsel and the legal adviser to the director’s Nonproliferation Center. She was executive director of two congressionally created commissions, on weapons of mass destruction and on terrorism. Following the attacks of 9/11, Ms. Spaulding worked with key critical infrastructure sectors as they reviewed their security posture and advised the CEOs of the Business Roundtable. In 2002, she was appointed by Governor Mark Warner of Virginia to the Secure Commonwealth Panel to advise the governor and the legislature regarding preparedness issues. She was managing partner of the Harbour Group, a principal in the Bingham Consulting Group, and of counsel to Bingham McCutchen LLP. In addition to her work at CSIS, Ms. Spaulding currently serves on a number of corporate boards and advisory boards and is a member of the Homeland Security Experts Group (HSEG).