Current Challenges Facing the Judiciary
Ten years ago, Duke Law School began publishing Judicature. Among the articles published in that first Duke edition was a lecture titled “Grand Challenges, Grand Ideas,” by David F. Levi, then-dean of Duke Law School. He highlighted five key issues of keen concern to the judiciary: access to justice; justice at a reasonable cost; an independent, transparent judiciary; criminal justice reform; and maintaining a sense of purpose.
To celebrate Judicature’s first “decade at Duke,” Levi — now dean emeritus of Duke Law School, director emeritus of Duke’s Bolch Judicial Institute (which has housed Judicature since 2018), and president of The American Law Institute — revisits the theme to examine challenges facing the judiciary today. Through two conversations held in Washington, D.C., in May 2025 — one with scholars and one with judges — Levi explores the particular challenge of maintaining an independent, transparent judiciary in the face of an extraordinary expansion of executive power.
Levi first spoke with Bob Bauer, a professor of practice at New York University School of Law who served as White House counsel from 2009 to 2011, and Jack Goldsmith, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School who served as assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004. Together, Bauer and Goldsmith co-authored the book After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency (Lawfare Press: 2020).
Directly following that discussion, the focus turned to the experiences of judges themselves. Lee Rosenthal, U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Texas, and Diane Wood, retired chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, director of The American Law Institute, and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, joined Levi to share their insights.
Their conversations, edited for clarity and length, is found on the Judicature website.