Ten years ago, Duke Law School began publishing Judicature. Among the articles featured in that first Duke edition was a lecture titled “Grand Challenges, Grand Ideas,” delivered by then–Dean David F. Levi, in which he identified five pressing issues facing the judiciary: access to justice; justice at a reasonable cost; an independent, transparent judiciary; criminal justice reform; and maintaining a sense of purpose.
To commemorate Judicature’s first decade at Duke, Levi — now dean emeritus of Duke Law School, director emeritus of the Bolch Judicial Institute, and president of the American Law Institute — revisited those themes to examine the challenges facing the judiciary today. In two conversations Levi moderated in Washington, D.C., in May 2025, he spoke with his guests about the difficulty of maintaining an independent, transparent judiciary amid an extraordinary expansion of executive power.
The first discussion featured Bob Bauer, professor of practice at NYU School of Law and former White House counsel, and Jack Goldsmith, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Drawing on their co-authored book After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, Bauer and Goldsmith examined the structural pressures facing the executive branch and the implications for judicial oversight.
A second conversation turned to the perspectives of judges themselves. U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal (Southern District of Texas) and Judge Diane P. Wood, retired chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and director of the American Law Institute, joined Levi to reflect on transparency, judicial independence, and the realities of safeguarding the rule of law from the bench.
Highlights from both conversations can be found in Judicature Vol. 109 No. 1 (2025), as part of a year-long celebration commemorating Judicature’s first Decade at Duke. We invite you to learn more about Judicature and the Decade at Duke campaign by visiting judicature.duke.edu/annual-campaign.