courts
Every record this desk has filed under courts, newest first, each with the number of sources it can still show you.
The federal judiciary's account of its artificial-intelligence work says courts have been 'cautioned' not to hand judging to a machine and users 'reminded' they are accountable — with no rule, no date and no consequence attached to either.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts published an account on September 17 of the Judicial Conference's September session, covering three initiatives. On artificial intelligence: a task force appointed in 2025 has identified more than 60 distinct issues and formed seven subject-matter subgroups; interim guidance has been issued to the courts; courts 'have been cautioned not to delegate core judicial functions to AI, including decision-making or case adjudication'; and users 'have been reminded that they are accountable for all work performed with the assistance of AI'. No binding rule is announced, no date is given for further guidance, and the item says nothing about AI-generated filings by litigants or about sanctions. On case management: the CM/ECF replacement's first component is on track before the end of 2026, with all new district court cases moving to it by the end of 2027 and appellate and bankruptcy courts to 'follow' — no date, and no dollar figure anywhere in the item. On courthouse property: legislation introduced July 30 would authorise a pilot in a maximum of 10 judicial districts; it has not passed, and the item names no bill number and no senators.
Also filed underjudiciaryartificial-intelligencecase-managementjudicial-conference
A judge gave the Education Department until September 11 to explain its new college admissions data collection. The explanation is published — including a 200-hour-per-school burden estimate.
In Massachusetts v. U.S. Department of Education, the federal court in Massachusetts granted the Department's motion to remand its Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement — a new component of the federal college data system, IPEDS — without vacating it, and ordered any supplemental explanation filed no later than September 11, 2026. The Department's revised explanation was published in the Federal Register on September 14. It defends collecting admissions data broken out by race-sex pair and by admissions test score quintile as central to the collection's purpose, and it estimates the work for each institution at 200 hours, against 6 to 9 hours for most other components of the same system. Whether the court accepts the explanation is not yet known.
Also filed undereducationipedsadmissionsfederal-registerdata-collection
The Epstein records fight moved on three fronts in three weeks. A judge closed one door on Ghislaine Maxwell, DOJ opened an appeal, and nobody agrees on what a redaction log is.
Between August 13 and September 2 the court record around the Epstein files moved in three places at once. In Manhattan, the judge who oversaw Ghislaine Maxwell's criminal case denied her motion to vacate her conviction, calling her claims all meritless and all or almost all frivolous, and found the new evidence she pointed to — principally EFTA releases — largely irrelevant to the charges against her. In Washington, in the Epstein Files Transparency Act suit Phang v. Blanche, the court heard oral argument on August 13, the Justice Department filed a protective notice of appeal of the June 25 preliminary injunction, and DOJ and the plaintiff are now fighting over whether a report DOJ published in the Federal Register satisfies the law's redaction-log duty. No ruling on that dispute has been entered. Here is what each filing says, and the dates to watch next.
Also filed underepsteineftadojtransparencyfoiacourt-records
A record appears here because it carries courts in its own frontmatter. If a record you expected is missing, it was filed under a different subject — the full list is on the topics index.