On February 13, 2020, Olivia Warren, staff attorney at the Center for the Death Penalty Litigation and former law clerk of the newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, brought national attention to the federal judiciary when she testified before the House Judiciary Committee.

In her testimony,  she gave a deeply personal recount of the sexual harassment she says she faced while serving as a law clerk for the late LA-based, Appellate Judge Stephen Reinhardt. In her testimony, Warren alleged that Judge Reinhardt persistently sexually harassed her and that the system meant to protect people like her did just the opposite.

Aliza Shatzman is a family law attorney and former law clerk in Washington D.C. and similarly to Warren's experience, she claims she too was a victim of gender discrimination and retaliation while clerking for a judge in D.C. Superior Court from 2019 to 2020. 

In a written Statement for the Record submitted to the House Committee on the Judiciary, she recalled her painful experience of harassment at the hands of a D.C. federal judge, including “[her] attempts to report the mistreatment, how the system failed [her] when she tried to report, and [her] efforts to seek justice for herself and accountability for the misbehaving former judge.”

When she filed her complaint against the judge to the D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure, she found out that there were very few legal protections from harassment and retaliation for law clerks who reported judges' misbehavior. Currently, judges are excluded from anti-discrimination laws, and in July 2021, Congress proposed a bill that would fix this: the Judiciary Accountability Act (JAA). The law would empower judiciary employees who experience abuse, harassment, and retaliation to sue judges under Title VII, along with a number of other measures that create more accountability for judges.

For Shatzman, this is just the base level of change needed. She believes the federal judiciary needs meaningful structural change to occur within a system that does little to protect law clerks and other court employees from harassment. We spoke to her about how pervasive this issue is and the legislative efforts being taken to hold judges more accountable. 

Editor's note: We reached out to the D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure for comment on this story and have not yet heard back. Any comments will be updated and made available ASAP.