The federal judiciary has a workplace problem it is constitutionally arranged to ignore. Federal judges hold their positions for life. The young lawyers who clerk for them — often fresh from elite law schools, carrying enormous student debt and the knowledge that a judicial clerkship is among the most career-defining opportunities in the legal profession — serve at those judges' pleasure, in chambers that are largely insulated from the employment protections available to virtually every other worker in America. Speak up about an abusive judge and you may find yourself blacklisted in a legal community where judicial recommendations are the coin of the realm. Stay silent and the abuse continues. For most clerks facing a difficult judge, there is no good option. The power differential is total.

Into that structural reality steps the story of U.S. Circuit Judge Sarah Merriam of the Second Circuit, which sits in New York and is considered one of the most prestigious appellate courts in the country. In 2023, Merriam was sanctioned after complaints established that she had created an "overly harsh" work environment for her clerks. Three years later, following a new complaint filed by the Legal Accountability Project — a nonprofit organization that documents judicial misconduct, particularly in the treatment of clerks — the Second Circuit has disciplined Merriam again. The new finding is starker than the first: her chambers had a culture of fear.

From 'Overly Harsh' to 'Culture of Fear'

The language of judicial discipline is measured, its vocabulary calibrated to the gravity of findings. The 2023 finding that Merriam's environment was "overly harsh" is, in that vocabulary, a warning — an acknowledgment that something was wrong and that the judge had been put on notice. It is the kind of sanction that exists, implicitly, to give the judge an opportunity to correct her conduct before more serious consequences follow. The 2023 discipline was accompanied by remedial measures: Merriam agreed to reforms, pledged to address the concerns that had been raised.

The 2026 finding tells us what happened next. A second complaint — this one brought by the Legal Accountability Project after gathering accounts from clerks who had served in Merriam's chambers — described not a marginally improved environment but one that had produced a "tense and challenging" atmosphere affecting all who worked there. The phrase that survived into the public record — "culture of fear" — is not merely a rhetorical escalation. It describes something distinct from ordinary workplace difficulty. A "culture" is not a single bad day or a demanding boss who loses her temper on deadline. A culture is a sustained environment, one that has developed its own norms, its own patterns of behavior, its own expectations about what is acceptable. A culture of fear is one in which people are afraid — afraid of doing wrong, afraid of speaking, afraid of being seen to fail. It is the kind of environment that does not correct itself, because the fear itself prevents the honest communication that correction requires.

A federal judge who creates a 'culture of fear' among law clerks is not merely a bad boss. She is wielding constitutional power against people who have no meaningful legal recourse — young lawyers whose entire careers can be shaped or destroyed by a single recommendation.

The Peculiar Vulnerability of Law Clerks

To understand why this matters beyond the chambers of one judge, it is necessary to understand what a federal clerkship is and what it costs a clerk to complain about it. A federal appellate clerkship — particularly one at a circuit as prestigious as the Second — is not merely a job. It is, in the legal profession, a credential that shapes the trajectory of an entire career. Clerks who serve at the Second Circuit regularly go on to elite law firm partnerships, prestigious academic positions, government service at the highest levels, and Supreme Court clerkships. The judge for whom you clerk becomes, in professional terms, a maker or a breaker of your reputation. That judge's assessment of your work — communicated formally in recommendations or informally in the dense network of relationships that constitute the upper tier of the legal world — can open or close doors for decades.

This is the structural condition that makes judicial workplace abuse so pernicious and so difficult to address. A clerk who is mistreated by a federal judge faces a choice that most workers in most contexts never confront: complain and potentially sacrifice the career benefit for which you gave up a year of your life, or endure the treatment and say nothing. The calculus is made worse by the fact that clerks often do not know each other — judges typically hire a small number per year, with staggered terms — and so cannot easily coordinate or establish that what they are experiencing is a pattern rather than an idiosyncratic rough patch. The first clerk who files a complaint does so alone, against one of the most powerful and least accountable officials in the American government.

The Legal Accountability Project exists, in part, to change that calculus. By gathering accounts from multiple clerks, by filing formal complaints with the institutional bodies charged with judicial discipline, and by making the pattern visible that individual clerks could not see on their own, the organization provides a mechanism for aggregating what would otherwise remain atomized and silenced. The second complaint against Merriam was the product of exactly this kind of organized advocacy. It took, in other words, a nonprofit watchdog group to accomplish what the judiciary's own internal accountability structures had not: to bring the problem back into the disciplinary system after the first sanction proved insufficient.

Reforms Pledged, Twice

Following the new discipline, Merriam agreed to take additional corrective actions. She pledged reforms to the work environment in her chambers — a commitment that mirrors, in general terms, the commitments that followed the 2023 sanction. The specifics of the new measures have not been made fully public, as is typical in the federal judicial discipline system, which conducts its proceedings with a degree of opacity that often frustrates the accountability goals it nominally serves.

What is not opaque is the pattern: a judge was sanctioned for an overly harsh workplace, agreed to reforms, and three years later was found to have maintained a culture of fear. The reforms either were insufficient, were not implemented in good faith, or were implemented in ways that failed to address the underlying dynamics. Any of these explanations is damning, and the most generous — that Merriam genuinely tried and genuinely failed — does not inspire confidence that a third round of pledged reforms will produce a different result.

The judicial discipline system for federal judges is, by its nature, reluctant to impose severe sanctions. Removal of a federal judge requires impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate — a process so politically complex and resource-intensive that it has been used fewer than fifteen times in the nation's history. Below that threshold, the judiciary is left to police itself through circuit councils, panels of judges overseeing other judges, with a range of remedies that stops well short of removal. The result is a system calibrated for protection of judicial independence at the expense of meaningful accountability for judicial misbehavior. It is a system that can sanction a judge twice for the same essential category of misconduct and, having done so, still leave her on the bench.

The Systemic Question

Merriam's case is not unique. Federal and state judiciaries across the country have grappled for years with complaints about judicial treatment of clerks, complaints that are systematically undercounted because most clerks never file them and most of those who do face a process that prioritizes the privacy of the judge over the protection of the complainant. The Legal Accountability Project has documented numerous instances in which judges with repeated complaints continued to sit without meaningful consequence, their records shielded by the judicial discipline system's default toward privacy and its structural preference for remediation over removal.

The question Merriam's second discipline poses is a structural one: what does a judicial accountability system owe to the clerks who serve under its judges? They are not employees in the conventional sense — they lack the basic anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation protections that cover most American workers. They are not quite independent contractors. They are, in practice, a category unto themselves: highly educated young professionals in an acute power relationship with a constitutional officer who answers to almost no one. Their wellbeing is largely dependent on the goodwill of the judge who hired them and the willingness of a self-policing institution to take their complaints seriously.

The two sanctions against Merriam suggest the institution is taking the complaints more seriously than it once did — a finding for which the Legal Accountability Project deserves credit. But "more seriously than before" is not the same as "seriously enough." A culture of fear, documented by multiple accounts and confirmed by formal disciplinary finding, that persists three years after the same judge was already sanctioned for the same category of conduct, is a system failure. The clerks who served in those three years deserved better. So did the ones before them.