At Legalweek, Judges Deliver a Stark Warning on Threats, Intimidation, and the Strain on the Rule of Law

Editor’s Note: This session during Legalweek 2026 in New York matters because it moved judicial safety out of abstraction and into the daily operating reality of courts, counsel, clients, and legal institutions. The discussion connected physical threats, digital harassment, doxxing, spoofing, swatting, online rhetoric, impeachment threats, declining public confidence in courts, and a documented drop in qualified judicial applicants into a single professional issue. For cybersecurity professionals, the message centered on exposure, targeting, and escalation. For information governance professionals, it raised questions about personal data, access, and the misuse of digital information. For eDiscovery professionals, it highlighted how filings, client communications, and public commentary can shape both litigation culture and risk. The panel also offered practical direction: manage client expectations, keep advocacy tied to the merits, avoid personal attacks, and treat civility as part of the legal process rather than a courtesy. Those points make the discussion especially relevant to professionals working at the intersection of law, data, and institutional trust.

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At Legalweek, Judges Deliver a Stark Warning on Threats, Intimidation, and the Strain on the Rule of Law

The warning came early: the conversation ahead would be difficult. By the end of the session, federal judges had described a threat environment that now reaches far beyond the courtroom and into homes, families, chambers, and public confidence in the rule of law.

On Day Three of Legalweek 2026 in New York, U.S. District Judge Esther Salas led a panel on judicial safety, independence, and the rule of law with U.S. District Judges Kenly Kiya Kato, Karoline Mehalchick, and Mia Roberts Perez. From the outset, the discussion rejected the idea that threats to judges are an abstract civic concern. The judges described a professional environment in which an adverse ruling can trigger abusive emails, threatening voicemails, online harassment, and growing concern that intimidation is becoming normalized.

Salas set the tone by recounting the July 19, 2020 attack at her home, when a disgruntled lawyer posing as a delivery driver killed her 20-year-old son, Daniel Anderl, and seriously wounded her husband. The account was not offered for emotional effect alone. It framed the panel’s central point: judges now live with the knowledge that anger over a legal decision may travel past briefing, appeal, and public criticism and arrive at the front door. That attack also led to the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, federal legislation intended to help shield judges’ personal information and strengthen protections for federal judges and their immediate families.

The panel’s first order of business was the question the room was implicitly asking: has all of this changed how judges do their jobs? Mehalchick’s answer was direct. The oath has not changed, nor has the commitment to decide cases according to law and fact. What has changed, she said, is the constant awareness in the background: who is watching, how an unhappy litigant may react, and whether the consequences of a ruling may now include an unwanted visitor, an abusive message, or something worse. Kato said the daily work of judging remains the same in substance, yet the threat overlay has become impossible to ignore. In one recent example, she said her first thought after colleagues issued high-profile rulings was whether the U.S. Marshals were already on alert.

The Numbers Behind the Warning

That sense of vigilance aligns with current threat data. According to U.S. Marshals Service figures reported by AP News, the agency recorded 564 threats to federal judges in fiscal 2025, following 509 in fiscal 2024 and 630 in fiscal 2023. Through February 19, 2026, the Marshals had already recorded 197 threats involving 171 unique judges. At Legalweek, the judges gave those numbers a human dimension. Perez noted that threats do not stop with a judge. They affect law clerks, assistants, deputies, and family members. A threatening voicemail can alter the rhythm of an entire chambers operation, prompting renewed security checks, contact with the Marshals, and new concerns about who has access to information and how easily a person can be found.

Before the panel turned to broader patterns and tactics, the audience heard those numbers made concrete. Salas played an audio recording of an actual threatening call received by a female federal district judge, one of what she described as thousands of similar calls judges receive. The recording, with only the judge’s name redacted at her request, contained graphic language, threats of violence, and sexual threats directed at the judge’s family. Salas noted that Chief Judge McConnell alone had received approximately 400 calls of that kind following a single ruling. Perez captured the cumulative toll in one word: exhausting.

One of the panel’s strongest themes was the distance between ordinary criticism of judicial decisions and the dehumanizing rhetoric now surrounding many judges. Kato drew that line plainly, noting that judges expect appeals and critique of their reasoning. What they do not accept as part of the job is language attacking their loyalty, integrity, or humanity. She also noted a structural constraint that makes the problem harder to address: judicial canons of conduct limit what judges can say publicly in their own defense. When dehumanizing attacks go unanswered, it is not because judges have nothing to say. It is because their professional obligations require them to stay above the fray. That is why, Kato said, the legal profession itself must serve as an ally and speak when judges cannot.

That link between rhetoric and action surfaced repeatedly. Salas was careful to affirm that she has denounced threats from both political directions, including publicly calling out protests at Supreme Court justices’ homes on Fox News in the weeks after Daniel’s murder. But she drew a clear distinction: what the country is facing now is not a symmetrical problem. She described the current situation as “apples to watermelons” compared with earlier periods and attributed the spike in judicial threats to a rhetorical climate that has intensified since 2015. In her view, political leaders at the highest levels are now using language about judges that has no modern precedent, and because people look to those leaders for cues on how to respond to rulings, the consequences are measurable in the threat data. Salas pointed to Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2024 year-end report, which identified four illegitimate attacks on the judiciary: violence, intimidation, disinformation, and defiance of lawful court orders. She told the audience that those four categories are no longer theoretical and are now visible in the daily lives of judges across the country.

Intimidation in Practice

The judges then turned to specific tactics: swatting, spoofing, harassing emails, threatening calls, and the now well-known wave of unsolicited pizza deliveries sent to judges’ homes, sometimes in Daniel Anderl’s name. Salas described those incidents as messages, not pranks. Someone, she said, knows where a judge lives, may know where that judge’s children live, and wants the target to connect that knowledge with a previous act of deadly violence. Mehalchick called it an insidious form of intimidation that bypasses lawful process entirely. Perez noted that when adult family members are drawn into those messages, the scope of the threat extends beyond the judge.

Salas also walked through a sequence of attacks on judges that have occurred since Daniel’s murder in 2020: Judge Roemer in Wisconsin, a retired judge zip-tied and assassinated by a man he had sentenced; Judge Wilkinson in Maryland, confronted by a disgruntled litigant in his driveway; and Judge Meyer in Indiana, whose home was targeted by individuals who attempted delivery ruses before opening fire, leaving him facing his fifth surgery at the time of the panel. Salas returned to a consistent theme: every one of those attacks happened at a judge’s home.

The practice has drawn enough attention that Sen. Dick Durbin formally called on the Justice Department to investigate, as reported by the American Bar Association, and Bloomberg Law documented deliveries sent specifically in Daniel Anderl’s name.

What made the discussion relevant well beyond judges themselves is that the threat environment it describes is inseparable from digital exposure. Address data, online ordering systems, social media amplification, and the searchability of personal information all feature in the tactics the panel described. For cybersecurity, information governance, and eDiscovery professionals, that is familiar terrain.

The Wanted Poster and Impeachment Threats

Two other developments the panel flagged have received less public attention but were treated by the judges as direct escalations of the same pressure campaign.

Mehalchick described a wanted poster that appeared in the U.S. Capitol, styled in the manner of an Old West handbill, targeting federal judges who had ruled against administration-aligned positions. It stopped short of the words “wanted dead or alive,” but the format and intent were unmistakable. The Federal Bar Association, through its congressional contacts, was able to have it removed. Salas noted she personally signed the letter requesting its removal, writing as Daniel’s mother.

Salas then raised the issue of impeachment threats, noting that in the entire history of the federal judiciary there have been only 15 attempts to impeach a federal judge, the most recent in 2010, when Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. was removed after being convicted of bribery and corruption. Articles of impeachment are now being filed against sitting district judges for issuing rulings that members of Congress disagreed with. Salas called it chilling. Mehalchick agreed that an adverse ruling does not constitute grounds for impeachment. Kato connected the point directly to the rule of law: if judges can be threatened with removal for deciding cases faithfully according to law, the independence of the judiciary is no longer structural but contingent.

The Effect on Who Seeks the Bench

One consequence the panel discussed that rarely enters public debate is the measurable effect of the current environment on judicial recruitment. Salas reported that applications for United States magistrate judge positions have dropped to roughly half the level she saw when she applied and that her court had to keep the application period open longer than usual due to insufficient candidates. She described the calculus facing qualified lawyers: strong private-sector salaries, a well-understood public service sacrifice, and now the addition of genuine physical risk and chronic stress for the lawyer’s entire family.

Mehalchick noted that judicial security concerns are making it harder to attract qualified candidates of any background. Perez offered a counterpoint specific to women: in her district, the opposite trend has taken hold, with five new female judges joining the bench in recent years and the Eastern District of Pennsylvania now led by its first female chief judge. But both observations pointed to the same pressure. The environment is changing who is willing to serve and on what terms.

The panel also addressed the particular exposure of female judges. Perez and Kato described threats that go beyond the professionally hostile into sexually violent territory. Appearance-based attacks and comments that would have been unthinkable in a courtroom a few years ago are now occurring in open proceedings. Kato noted that it is sometimes lawyers themselves, not just litigants, who make or allow those comments. The panel’s message to practitioners in the room was direct: address it when you hear it.

Public Confidence and the Disinformation Problem

The panel also spent time on public confidence in the courts. Salas argued that rhetoric portraying judges as rogue, partisan, or corrupt is affecting how the public sees the justice system. Speaking explicitly in her capacity as Daniel’s mother rather than as a judicial officer, she described the campaign to discredit judges as an intentional public relations strategy: delegitimize the institution, and the public stops trusting it. Survey data she cited showed confidence in federal courts dropping from 60 percent in 2021 to 57 percent in 2022, confidence in state courts from 64 percent to 60 percent, and confidence in the Supreme Court from 63 percent to 53 percent over the same period. She noted that more recent numbers would almost certainly be lower.

Mehalchick took that concern to its endpoint: if people begin to believe court orders are optional because judges are illegitimate, then the third branch of government loses force in practice, not just reputation. Kato extended the point to everyday legal life, noting that a breakdown in trust does not stop at politically charged cases. It reaches contract disputes and the ordinary expectation that judicial decisions will be followed even by disappointed parties. Salas pushed further, arguing that the stakes extend to commerce itself: patent holders, trademark owners, parties to commercial agreements, and anyone relying on the courts to enforce a judgment all depend on public confidence that rulings carry force.

Recent polling supports the concern. Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions survey, released in July 2024, found that Americans’ confidence in the judicial system and courts had dropped sharply compared with 2020, reflecting a broader erosion in institutional trust across government. The judges’ point at Legalweek was that such distrust does not remain abstract for long. Once public confidence weakens, pressure grows on the practical mechanisms that allow courts to function.

Practical Direction for Legal Professionals

The discussion was not all diagnosis. The judges also offered direction grounded in daily legal work. Perez returned often to client management, urging lawyers to explain process, separate disagreement from personal attack, and make clear that judges are applying law rather than personal preference. She pointed to a specific recent filing in which a defense attorney threatened an opposing AUSA and cited the social media commentary of powerful officials as if that commentary carried legal weight. Mehalchick urged practitioners to keep filings professional and avoid turning briefs into vehicles for insult or personal attack on opposing counsel. Salas warned against repeating overheated rhetoric without reading the underlying decisions. Perez also cautioned lawyers to use social media responsibly, especially when discussing active matters, noting that judges increasingly see online commentary drawn into court filings.

Those observations may be among the session’s most useful takeaways for legal, technology, and risk professionals. In legal operations, cyber response, compliance, and discovery practice, professionalism is often discussed as tone or culture. The panel reframed it as risk control. A lawyer who manages expectations, keeps advocacy tied to the merits, reduces unnecessary exposure of personal information, and avoids performative commentary is doing something larger than protecting reputation. That lawyer is helping reduce pressure on the system itself.

The judges also called for renewed investment in civics education, noting that large numbers of students and adults do not understand the structure or role of the federal judiciary. Perez argued that much of the hostility directed at judges stems from genuine ignorance about what judges do, how they are constrained, and why their silence on political matters reflects professional obligation rather than indifference. Kato added that this education gap extends to lawyers’ clients and is exactly where practitioners can make a difference in daily conversations outside the courtroom.

A Four-Letter Word at a Legal Conference

The discussion ended where it began, with words. Kato urged the audience to talk to families, clients, and colleagues about what is happening. Mehalchick called on attendees to speak openly about why an independent judiciary matters. Salas closed with a challenge for people to be more careful, more civil, and more disciplined in how they speak and think, and added a word rarely heard at legal technology conferences: love.

That was the panel’s lasting message: the strain on the rule of law does not begin only when violence occurs or when a court order is openly defied. It can begin much earlier, in language that dehumanizes, in wanted posters in legislative halls, in impeachment threats filed over disfavored rulings, in conduct that normalizes intimidation, and in professional habits that allow contempt for process to spread unchecked. If that pattern continues, how long can confidence in justice remain intact?

News Source

• Day 3 Keynote Judges Panel: Judicial Security and the Rule of Law — Salas, E., Kato, K.K., Mehalchick, K., & Roberts Perez, M. (2026, March). Legalweek 2026, New York, NY.
• Threats to federal judges have more than doubled in ‘alarming’ spike, US Marshals director says (AP News)
• Congress Passes Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act (U.S. Courts)
• 2024 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary (Supreme Court of the United States)
• Sen. Durbin wants DOJ to Probe Anonymous Pizza Deliveries to Judges (American Bar Association)
• Pizzas Sent to Judges’ Homes in Name of Judge’s Murdered Son (Bloomberg Law)

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Source: ComplexDiscovery OÜ

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