When Senior Judge Morrison England joined the federal trial court in Sacramento he knew to expect long hours to manage the district’s high caseload on such a small bench. But, England said, “there was always this belief that there would be more help on the way.”
More than two decades later, the caseload for the US District Court for the Eastern District of California has reached more than 1,000 cases per judge, and that help has yet to arrive.
“It’s too much,” England said in an interview. He plans to completely stop hearing cases this October, after five years of managing hundreds of cases at a time under a form of semi-retirement known as senior status.
The six-seat court based in Sacramento and Fresno has relied on its three senior judges, as well as judges from other districts, to keep pace with a heavy workload stemming in part from a population that has more than doubled since the court was last expanded in 1978.
But that safety valve is threatening to burst—not just in the Eastern District of California but also at overworked districts across the country—as senior judges depart and a stubborn congressional stalemate has prevented the addition of new judgeships.
More than a dozen districts have over 600 weighted case filings per authorized judgeship, the judiciary’s threshold for evaluating when a court vacancy constitutes a judicial emergency, according to fiscal 2023 data.
It has been more than 20 years since Congress last added a new judgeship anywhere in the country, and more than three decades since it expanded the federal district courts more broadly. Perhaps nowhere are the consequences of Congress’ inaction more evident than in California’s Eastern District, which stretches inland from the Oregon border more than 500 miles down to Bakersfield, located north of Los Angeles.
The Eastern District has more than 700 weighted filings per judgeship, and 1,300 pending cases per judgeship. That’s the highest of California’s four federal courts, and one of the highest in the country when districts handling multidistrict litigation are excluded.
The judges’ exhausting workload has consequences for the people who live in the Eastern District: During fiscal 2023, which ended in September last year, criminal cases and civil cases that go to trial are both being processed at the third-slowest pace in the nation.
England, 69, said he would have considered staying on longer if the caseload were more manageable. “There’s a point in time where it’s like, look, I just can’t do this anymore,” he said. “And why is that Washington has no ability to look at us and see something?”
The district’s population has risen at more than twice the national growth rate since it last received a new permanent judgeship in 1978. The court, which was created in the 1960s, has never kept pace with the booming region it serves, say lawyers and judges.
“Our population went way up, and they didn’t give us the resources on the bench to meet the growth,” said Judge John Mendez, one of the three senior judges in the Eastern District still hearing cases. “And with more people, you’re going to have more lawsuits.”
The Southwest border regions, which have seen high levels of immigration-related cases, and Delaware, a hub for patent and business litigation, have also been identified by the judiciary as urgently needing reinforcements on the bench—a situation made more dire as senior judges, who serve in addition to approved judgeships, may be pushed into an earlier retirement.
“The workload is overwhelming. My colleagues and I could each work 120 hours a week and we’d never get through the work,” said Chief Judge Colm Connolly of the US District Court for the District of Delaware.
Past efforts to add more judgeships have faced political gridlock. Republicans have previously tried to tie the issue to separate efforts to break up the San Francisco-based US Court Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the nation’s largest federal appeals court.
Congress has a rare window of opportunity this year to address the problem. Bipartisan bills that would allow the next few presidents to add dozens of new judgeships—including for the Eastern District—have recently gained traction in the House and Senate.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider legislation, led by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.), on Thursday. That bill would create new judgeships in 2025 and 2029 for the next two administrations to fill.
But lawmakers face a political deadline of Election Day, after which point any bills giving more judges will become more difficult once it’s clear who will control the White House next year.
Booming Population
The Eastern District’s challenges date back more than two decades. McGregor W. Scott, who served as US attorney for the district during the George W. Bush and Trump administrations, recalled advocating for more judgeships at a meeting about 20 years ago in Washington to James Comey, then the deputy attorney general.
To illustrate the vastness of his district, he brought a map. “I had my guy take the Eastern District and flip it, and put it on the Eastern Seaboard. It stretched from New York City to Charleston, South Carolina,” Scott said. “People can’t grasp that.”
As of 2023, the district had nearly 1.4 million residents for each active judgeship—the highest disparity of any federal trial court nationwide.
Meanwhile, the Sacramento area’s population continues to grow thanks to affordable housing prices that attracted newcomers from the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly during the pandemic when remote work increased.
The beleaguered court has adopted emergency measures in recent years, including by seeking help from judges from other districts, who volunteered to take cases.
Cases may be assigned to “no district judge” until they can be properly calendared. The court has twice the number of magistrate judges as district court judges, an atypical ratio.
Still, lawyers who frequently argue before the court described longer adjudication times for motions to be decided and trials to be set.
People facing criminal charges have a constitutional right to a speedy trial, meaning civil litigation often bears the brunt of the delays. The median time between filing date to the start of trial, for civil cases with completed trials, is over 60 months, according to fiscal 2023 data—one of the longest of any federal district court.
Litigation delays at the federal court prompt conversations with clients about whether it’s worth moving a case out of state court, said Kyle Owen, a Sacramento-based employment lawyer who spent more than a decade as a courtroom clerk and then judicial clerk at the Eastern District.
A criminal case that gets resolved in two years in state or other federal courts might stretch out over three or even four years in the Eastern District, said Jennifer Mouzis, a criminal defense attorney and board member of the Sacramento County Bar Association. She said she hasn’t had a criminal defendant’s case thrown out on constitutional grounds for moving too slowly, but that it “certainly is a risk.”
That caseload crisis has been felt most acutely in Fresno, which has two active judges and no senior judges.
Judge Jennifer Thurston, one of the two, currently has nearly 1,000 cases on her docket, and she said spends up to 90% of her time trying to keep up with her criminal caseload.
It’s a caseload she’s largely shouldered alone, as the other judge at the Fresno court, Kirk Sherriff, recently joined the bench from the US Attorney’s Office and can’t hear certain criminal cases that office handled while he was there.
Thurston, a former magistrate judge on the court, said she thought she knew what the workload would be like when she was sworn in as a district court judge in 2021.
“Then I got this job and thought, ‘Holy moly, no, I didn’t,’ ” Thurston said.
Now, she says the courthouse is “just one serious illness away from complete collapse.”
‘I Am Tired’
The Eastern District’s Chief Judge Kimberly Mueller isn’t sure how long she’ll continue hearing cases after stepping down as chief this fall.
She plans to take a reduced caseload while in senior status for at least a year. But after that?
“I just don’t know,” Mueller said in an interview in her Sacramento chambers in May. “I am tired.”
“We’re just always bandaging it together, and so we wear out,” Mueller said. “And I think that’s partly why we have fewer senior judges sticking around now.”
Her court has consistently been on the list of courts in need of expansion by the Judicial Conference, the courts’ policy-making body. The conference has most recently recommended an additional four active judgeships to bring the number of judges to 10.
A comparison to the Northern District of California, based in San Francisco, illustrates just how overburdened the Eastern District judges are: The population in the 34-county district is over 8.3 million, roughly equal to the population of the Northern District. Yet the latter has 14 active judges and 10 senior judges still hearing some cases – more than double Eastern’s active judges and more than triple the senior judges who still hear cases.
In 2021, shortly after becoming chief judge, Mueller testified remotely before a congressional committee to urge Congress to pass legislation authorizing more judgeships for her court. She described the judges as “at a breaking point” and their efforts to stay afloat of their caseloads as “Sisyphean.”
Mendez has a photo of his investiture ceremony hanging in his chambers showing the 10 senior and active judges who served on the court in 2008, when he was sworn in. Out of that group, Mendez will be one of just two still there after England steps down—a high rate of attrition for judges who are appointed to life terms.
It’s “unusual” for judges to be eligible for senior status—allowing them to hear fewer cases while still collecting a salary—and to not stay, said Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge for the Northern District of California.
“It is really anomalous. It’s not as true in other places in the country,” Fogel said.
‘Crushing Workload’
Coons, who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said he and other lawmakers hear regularly from federal district court judges about the increasing strain on their professional lives. In his state, the Delaware district court has just four active judgeships, and only one senior judge still taking cases. Those four active judges “serve under a crushing workload,” he said.
“Frankly, it is harder to persuade senior and experienced and compelling candidates to put their names forward for service because they know how crushing the workload is,” Coons said.
Still, past calls to Congress for help haven’t led to the creation of judgeships as key Senate Republicans have expressed skepticism about the effort. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said last month that he doesn’t object to adding judges but that he has questions about the methodology used in the legislation.
Now, even as Congress eyes potential legislation action, judges in Sacramento aren’t optimistic that Congress will come to their rescue.
“It’s not going to happen in my lifetime,” Mendez said.
—With assistance from data reporter Jon Meltzer
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