The State of Judicial and Attorney Discipline in America

The courts belong to the public. The public entrusts judges with administering justice, and lawyers who are admitted to practice become officers of the courts in which they appear. Together, judges and attorneys serve as guardians of the public's trust in the judicial system, yet they are largely responsible for policing themselves. That system of self-regulation largely fails to hold misconduct accountable, eroding public confidence in the courts.

That erosion of trust is increasingly visible in public opinion — and it runs deeper than the partisan fight over the Supreme Court. Gallup’s World Poll finds Americans’ confidence in the judicial system and courts at a record-low 35% in 2024 — down 24 points in four years and about 20 points below the average for wealthy democracies. The same breadth shows up across less political measures: fewer than one in four Americans express confidence in the criminal justice system, and Gallup’s annual honesty-and-ethics survey rates judges at a record-low 28% — down from around half two decades ago — with lawyers, too, rated more negatively than positively. Asked by the World Justice Project to describe the state of the rule of law in the United States, the word Americans chose most often was “corrupt.”

“Corrupt” is difficult to quantify; however, evidence may be found in the number of complaints against lawyers and judicial officials. The number of U.S. lawyers has grown by nearly 40% since 1999, even as the number of judges has barely moved.

Over the same period, disciplinary agencies have taken in on the order of 110,000 complaints a year against attorneys — roughly 90 per 1,000 lawyers. Complaints against judges are far harder to see: no one counts them nationally, and only the federal courts publish a figure at all.

Meanwhile public discipline has moved the other way, from about 3,900 lawyers disciplined in 1999 to roughly 2,500 in 2023; adjusted for the profession’s growth, the rate has fallen by about half. Judges are sanctioned in far smaller numbers — on the order of a hundred a year nationwide. More professionals, steady complaints, less discipline. Quite simply, the system is not working — and, as the figures below show, the familiar national statistics understate the problem rather than overstate it.

Whose system is it?

What makes these numbers worth watching is who produces them. In the United States, lawyers are not regulated by a consumer agency, a legislature, or an executive department. They are regulated by the courts — and, in practice, by other lawyers.

Each state's highest court holds the inherent authority to decide who may practice law and who may be disciplined or disbarred. The courts adopt the rules of professional conduct (most modeled on the ABA's Model Rules) and delegate enforcement to disciplinary agencies, bar counsel, and grievance committees that operate under the judicial branch. The judges who ultimately rule on discipline are themselves members of the bar; the committees that investigate are staffed largely by lawyers. The profession writes its own rules, investigates its own members, and decides its own sanctions. The same broad pattern — the judiciary overseeing its own — largely holds for the system that disciplines judges, though its mechanisms vary by state.

Vitreo's starting conviction is straightforward: the courts do not belong to the lawyers and judges who run them — they belong to the public. An independent bar genuinely matters; lawyers must be free to challenge the government without fear of losing their licenses, and that is the strongest reason to keep licensing out of political hands. But independence is not the same as secrecy. A profession that writes its own rules, judges its own members, and resolves the great majority of complaints quietly and without public sanction is, at the very least, owed close public scrutiny. Independence can be preserved while the results are made transparent; the two do not conflict.

The figures in this report are consistent with that concern. Public discipline reaches only a few complaints in a hundred; the public-discipline rate has fallen by roughly half even as the profession has grown; and a lawyer's odds of being sanctioned swing roughly eightfold depending on which state issued the license. None of that, on its own, proves the system is too lenient — but the public currently has almost no practical way to examine it and judge for itself. Closing that information gap is the reason this project exists.

A profession that keeps growing

The ABA's National Lawyer Population Survey counts just over 1.0 million resident, actively-licensed lawyers in 1999. By 2025 that figure reaches roughly 1.38 million — growth of about 38%, outpacing U.S. population growth over the same span. The climb was steady through the 2000s and 2010s, with only a brief plateau around 2020 before resuming.

Discipline is moving the other way

Against that rising tide of lawyers, the number formally and publicly disciplined each year has fallen. Summing every jurisdiction, about 3,900 lawyers were publicly sanctioned in 2007; by 2024 the figure was roughly 2,300. Because the profession grew over the same span, the rate fell even more sharply — from about 3.5 per 1,000 lawyers to about 1.7 per 1,000, a drop of roughly 50%.

Complaints stay high while discipline drifts down

Disciplinary agencies field a large, fairly steady stream of grievances. Counting every jurisdiction, the country sees on the order of 100,000 to 130,000 complaints a year — roughly 90 per 1,000 lawyers — with no sustained decline. Set that against the falling number of lawyers actually disciplined and the two lines pull apart: complaints hold steady (and have ticked back up since 2020) while formal public discipline drifts down.

The divergence is the heart of the matter: more grievances are evidently being resolved short of any public sanction — dismissed, diverted, or handled privately. How big that gap is, and how it varies, is what the rest of this report tries to make legible.

Counting the whole country, not just who answered

There is a blunt problem with every "national" lawyer-discipline figure in common use: it is simply the sum of whichever states answered the ABA's voluntary survey that year — and fewer do every year. When a state drops out, the national total falls, not because misconduct fell but because a state stopped answering the phone. Of the 51 jurisdictions (50 states + DC), all but a handful reported in 2007; by 2023 only about three-quarters did. A falling line drawn that way means almost nothing.

So we don't draw it that way. Vitreo rebuilds the national totals from the bottom up — jurisdiction by jurisdiction. For each state and year we use, in order of preference: the state agency's own published figure; where that is missing, the ABA survey as a gap-filler; and where a state has stopped reporting, an estimate from its own most recent rate applied to its current lawyer count. Every one of the 51 jurisdictions is present in every year — nothing silently drops out.

Reassembled this way, the picture is materially different from the published one. The Vitreo all-state series runs above the ABA's responders-only total — and the gap widens in exactly the years when participation thinned, which is the tell that the published decline is partly a counting artifact.

How much discipline do complaints actually produce?

Measure public discipline against the flood of complaints and a consistent picture emerges. Across the period, the number of lawyers publicly disciplined has equaled only about 3.5% of complaints at the start, sliding to roughly 2% most recently. Put the other way: in a typical year, 97 to 98 percent of complaints produce no public discipline at all — they are screened out, dismissed, diverted, or resolved privately.

Geography is destiny

Perhaps the most consequential finding is how unevenly discipline is applied — and to see it clearly, the ABA survey is not enough. So Vitreo went to the source: we compiled discipline statistics directly from each jurisdiction's own disciplinary agency, jurisdiction by jurisdiction — 2,900 data points spanning all 51 U.S. jurisdictions. Measured on a common yardstick — lawyers publicly disciplined per 1,000 licensed lawyers — the contrast is stark. Across the 37 states whose own agencies publish enough to compute a defensible rate, the figure runs from about 5.7 per 1,000 in Maine — the most active — down to about 0.7 per 1,000 in Ohio, a spread of roughly 8×. The typical (median) state disciplines about 2.0 per 1,000 a year. A lawyer's odds of facing public discipline depend heavily on which state issued the license.

The same collection lets us look past public sanctions to the whole funnel. Across the 51 jurisdictions, the median agency turns only about 2.5% of the complaints it receives into public discipline — meaning roughly 97 to 98 percent of complaints end with no public sanction at all, dismissed, diverted, or resolved privately. That is consistent with the national picture above, and it holds across states of every size.

The interactive dashboard lets you rank every state by complaints, sanctions, disbarments, suspensions, and computed rates, year by year.

And the judges?

Lawyers are one half of the picture; judges are the other — and the record there is even thinner. Judges are disciplined by separate state conduct commissions and, for federal judges, by the judiciary itself under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act. The same pattern recurs: a steady stream of public complaints, formal discipline in only a sliver of cases, and a system run by the bench. Nationwide, only on the order of 75 to 100 state judges a year are publicly sanctioned, and federal judges almost never — of more than 1,300 complaints filed annually, vanishingly few produce any formal sanction.

How many judges are publicly disciplined?

There is no ABA-style census of judicial discipline, but the National Center for State Courts' Center for Judicial Ethics reviews the public outcomes each year. The totals are small: across all 50 states and DC, public dispositions of judicial-conduct cases run on the order of 115 to 140 a year, of which the core sanctions — a judge removed from office, suspended without pay, or publicly censured, reprimanded, or admonished — number around 95. For a country with tens of thousands of state judges, that is a remarkably thin slice.

The judicial complaint funnel is even narrower

No one publishes a national count of complaints filed against state judges; the figure is scattered across separate conduct commissions, each counting differently. Vitreo compiled what individual states do report. Where a state discloses both complaints and sanctions for the same year, the median jurisdiction turns just 0.9% of complaints into public discipline — meaning roughly 99 percent produce no public sanction. That funnel is even tighter than the lawyer system's (about 2.5%).

Who publishes the judicial numbers?

Judicial-conduct transparency varies as much as the discipline itself. Of the 51 jurisdictions, 30 publish usable aggregate figures on judicial discipline, 11 publish partial or sporadic data, and 10 publish essentially nothing. Vitreo has collected judicial figures for 43 jurisdictions; 8 publish too little to include at all (—).

Federal judges: many complaints, almost no discipline

For the federal bench the funnel narrows almost to a point. Under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, complaints against federal judges are reviewed by other federal judges. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reports the caseload: more than 1,300 complaints are filed in a typical year — yet formal sanctions are vanishingly rare. In the most recent reported year, of 1,596 complaints terminated, essentially none produced a censure or reprimand; the year before, of 1,338 resolved, exactly one led to a temporary suspension of case assignments. Almost all are dismissed by the judges' own colleagues, most because they merely disputed a ruling.

Federal judges hold their seats for life. Short of the conduct process, the only way to remove one is impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate — which has succeeded against a judge just eight times in the nation's history. The structural result is a bench almost entirely insulated from formal external discipline.

Why Vitreo publishes this

Reform of any public institution begins with visibility. Citizens cannot press for change in a system they cannot see — and today the record of how lawyers and judges are policed sits scattered across decades of PDFs, inconsistent state reports, and agencies under no real obligation to make their work legible to the people they serve.

Vitreo's mission is to change that: to gather, standardize, and openly publish the statistics on complaints against — and discipline of — the legal profession and the judiciary, and to keep them current as new data is released. We present the numbers plainly, document our methods and their limits, and let the public reach its own conclusions about what reforms, if any, to demand. This report covers both the bar and the bench; judicial conduct, where public visibility is often even thinner, gets the same treatment here as lawyer discipline.

The aim is not to indict anyone. It is to give the public — the rightful owner of the courts — the same clear view of the system's performance that the profession has always had of itself.