A nonprofit group that advocates for law clerks has taken the rare step of filing a misconduct complaint against a federal appeals court judge, alleging that she bullies and mistreats law clerks and that the courts' process for fielding such claims is broken.
The complaint from the Legal Accountability Project against Judge Sarah Merriam of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit states that it is based on conversations with multiple former law clerks who fear retaliation if they come forward themselves.
"She is a bully, in all the ways one might bully their employees: yelling, berating clerks, sending all-caps unhinged emails," said Aliza Shatzman, president and founder of the Legal Accountability Project.
The Legal Accountability Project complaint, which has not been previously reported, was filed earlier this month and reviewed by NPR. The group says it marks the second publicly known complaint in four years about Merriam. Such complaints are not usually made public. Instead, they tend to be handled internally, by courts that police themselves, in part to protect the judiciary's independence and balance of power.
In a nearly yearlong investigation, NPR found a culture of fear about reporting judges and concluded that the courts' internal system often fails to result in meaningful change.
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