Next POTUS may have limited impact on shape of judiciary, Racial gaps persist in legal jobs, New Hampshire Supreme Court justice indicted, and more?

?? Good morning from The Legal File! Here is the rundown of today's top legal news:

??? Harris or Trump, next president will have less impact on shape of US judiciary

No matter which candidate wins the U.S. presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will face one similar reality: fewer opportunities to reshape the federal judiciary.

By the time Democratic President Joe Biden leaves office, he and Trump, his Republican predecessor, will have within just eight years appointed about half of all 890 life-tenured federal judges nationally.

Trump named three U.S. Supreme Court justices to Biden's one, giving it a 6-3 conservative supermajority. Both presidents favored younger appointees overall on the judiciary, creating a generational shift on the federal bench.

Thanks to these demographics, the supply of judges eligible to take "senior status" — a form of semi-retirement judges can take at 65 after 15 years of judicial service that creates a vacancy on the bench for the president to fill — is shrinking.

Sixty-seven vacancies currently exist on the federal bench or are expected to open up based on judges' announced plans to take senior status, but Biden already has nominees awaiting Senate consideration to fill 28 of them, according to data maintained by the judiciary.

Another 247 judges — 131 appointed by Democratic presidents and 116 by Republicans — will be eligible to move into semi-retirement over the next four years, opening new vacancies, according to an analysis by the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal group.

But judges do not always retire when they become eligible to do so, and research shows they are increasingly timing their retirements to when a president of the same party as the one who appointed them is in office.

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??Racial, ethnicity gaps in new lawyer jobs persisted in 2023, amid robust job market

A blockbuster job market for new law grads in 2023 did not alleviate racial and ethnicity disparities in employment rates, data from the National Association for Law Placement shows.

Even as the gaps narrowed for most minority groups, the employment disparity between white and Latino law grads increased from the previous year.

The disparities are widest when looking at legal jobs that require bar admission. Among white law grads, 84% had secured those positions within 10 months of graduation. But of Black law grads and Native American or Alaska Natives, 73% were in those jobs.

Just 80% of Latino law grads secured those jobs, four percentage points lower than their white classmates. Asian law grads had 81% bar passage-required employment rate, while Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders posted the lowest such employment rate at 67%.

The new figures came amid an unusually robust job market for 2023 law graduates, according to NALP data released in July. Overall, 92.6% of them landed jobs within 10 months of graduation — up half a percentage point from the previous year.

"This year's data highlights the need to continue working to dismantle the systemic inequities that prevent graduates of color from achieving equitable employment outcomes," NALP Executive Director Nikia Gray said in a prepared statement, adding that efforts to disrupt discrimination are "increasingly under attack."

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?? New Hampshire Supreme Court justice indicted for interfering with probe

New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi has been indicted on charges that she attempted to interfere with a criminal investigation into her husband, the longtime director of the New Hampshire Division of Ports and Harbors.

She was charged with two felonies and five misdemeanors in indictments returned by a grand jury in Merrimack County.

Hantz Marconi, who Republican Governor Christopher Sununu appointed in 2017, has been on paid administrative leave since July. She is one of four Republican appointees on the five-justice state high court. Her husband, Geno Marconi, has been on leave from his position since April.

“No person is above the law, and the evidence in this case required investigation and presentation to the grand jury,” New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said in a statement. "The decision to charge a sitting justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court was not made lightly, and it comes after careful and thoughtful deliberation."

Hantz Marconi's lawyers — Richard Guerriero and Oliver Bloom of Lothstein Guerriero and Jonathan Kotlier of Nutter McClennen & Fish — in a joint statement said she was innocent and "did not violate any law or rule."

"We will fight the charges to the fullest extent permitted by the law, starting with motions to dismiss the case which we anticipate filing soon," they said.

The indictments alleged that Hantz Marconi sought to improperly influence the investigation by telling Sununu that it was the result of "personal, petty and/or political biases" and had no merit. She is also accused of soliciting the chair of the Pease Development Authority, which oversees the Division of Ports and Harbors, to secure an improper advantage with regard to the employment and investigation of her husband.

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?? US prosecutors see rising threat of AI-generated child sex abuse imagery

U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use AI tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material.

The Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children.

"There’s more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this. AI makes it easier to generate these kinds of images, and the more that are out there, the more normalized this becomes. That’s something that we really want to stymie and get in front of."

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit group that collects tips about online child exploitation, receives an average of about 450 reports each month related to generative AI, according to Yiota Souras, the group's chief legal officer.

Cases involving AI-generated sex abuse imagery are likely to tread new legal ground, particularly when an identifiable child is not depicted. Silver said in those instances, prosecutors can charge obscenity offenses when child pornography laws do not apply.

Legal experts said that while sexually explicit depictions of actual children are covered under child pornography laws, the landscape around obscenity and purely AI-generated imagery is less clear.

"These prosecutions will be hard if the government is relying on the moral repulsiveness alone to carry the day,” said Jane Bambauer, a University of Florida law professor who studies AI and its impact on privacy and law enforcement.

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?? That's all for today, thank you for reading?The Legal File and have a great day!

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