It includes records on the conduct of the 1953 Rosenberg trial, loyalty cases, reactions to the 1966 Miranda decision, assessments of prospective justices, relations with Supreme Court employees, policy and research statements made by Supreme Court justices, and favors done for justices and their spouses. The Federal Judges Subject File spans the years from 1939, when it was opened, to 1989. About 80 percent of its pages have been released and are published here. About half of the file included in this micropublication consists of field reports on the backgrounds of federal judges sitting in 1939, when a comprehensive report was ordered by the attorney general. Similar reports are from earlier dates, since the bureau had been asked to do checks on nominees to federal judgeships starting in 1930.
Internal memos assessing judges and nominees routinely consider their attitudes toward the bureau.
For the more recent years, there are statistics on judicial vacancies and FBI prosecutions. Incomplete as they necessarily are, both files go far to clarify the historical record in this critical area of research on how the executive branch's FBI and the judicial branch have dealt with one another over the years. Filmed from photocopies of documents released to the editor through Freedom of Information Act requests.