Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building.

Students from the top three law schools in the country are pushing the federal judiciary to step up its efforts to combat sexual misconduct by judges, saying they are "frustrated by the slow progress" achieved since the problem came to national attention in 2017.

A coalition of law student groups from Harvard, Yale and Stanford sent a letter Feb. 24 to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and the chief judges of the country's 13 federal appellate courts that urges the judiciary to bolster its mechanisms for judicial clerks and other court employees to report misconduct, and to adopt a more uniform process to collect data on harassment and make it available to the public and to law schools.

"We write on behalf of law students who believe that the federal judiciary has responded inadequately to widespread misconduct and are concerned that the judiciary is not a safe working environment," the letter reads.

It was signed by the Harvard Women's Law Association; Stanford Law School for Gender Violence Prevention; Women of Stanford Law; Yale Law Women; and the Yale Law School Title IX Working Group. The letter was also endorsed by the People's Parity Project, a student organization that started at Harvard Law but has since established chapters at six top law campuses.

The letter references the testimony of Olivia Warren, a former clerk for the late U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who on Feb. 13 testified before a House Judiciary committee that the judge repeatedly harassed her throughout her 2017 clerkship. The movement to confront sexual misconduct by federal judges got underway in 2017, when former Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski retired amid allegations of sexual harassment. But the problem is not limited to those jurist, and the students wrote that the unique relationship between judges and clerks—with a significant imbalance of power—makes clerks particularly vulnerable.

"The unique closeness of a chambers environment, the early career stage of most law clerks, the importance of clerking relationships to future employment, and the opaqueness of available remedies have made law clerks extremely reluctant to report misconduct," the student letter reads.

The letter recommends several key changes by the federal judiciary. Among them:

• The judiciary should establish a uniform set of questions on misconduct for surveys of clerks and court employees, even if circuit courts conduct such surveys independently. Data on judicial misconduct should be available to the public and reported in a standardized way.
• The newly created Office of Judicial Integrity should serve as a centralized reporter of data on misconduct and serve as a place for clerks and court employees to report misconduct, as they may fear retaliation should they report problems to their own circuits.
• Both the Office of Judicial Integrity and the circuits themselves should share information about judicial misconduct with law schools, which serve as conduits for judicial clerks.

"This is not the first step to address misconduct, and it won't be the last," said Yale Law student Anna Kaul, a member of the Yale Law Women, of the student letter. "We will continue to call for transparency and accountability to ensure that judicial employees are afforded the safety and respect that all workers deserve."