James C. Duff

James C. Duff
Known for	Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts

James C. Duff is the Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. He was appointed to the position by Chief Justice John Roberts effective January 1, 2015. This is Duff's second appointment to lead the Administrative Office. He previously served as Director from 2006 to 2011.

Duff is responsible for the management of the Administrative Office, which has approximately 1,000 employees, and for providing administrative support to 2,400 judicial officers, and nearly 29,000 court employees. He serves as liaison for the judicial branch in its relations with Congress, including working with congressional committees to secure the Judiciary's annual appropriation and executing the Judiciary's budget of approximately $7 billion annually.

The Director of the Administrative Office is the chief administrative officer of the federal courts. He serves under the direction of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the principal policy-making body for the federal court system. The Chief Justice is the presiding officer of the Conference, which is composed of the chief judges of the 13 courts of appeals, a district judge from each of the 12 geographic circuits, and the chief judge of the Court of International Trade. The Chief Justice selects the Director.

From September 2011 to December 2014, Duff was chief executive officer of the Newseum, an interactive museum of news in Washington, D.C., that promotes free expression and the five freedoms of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution; president and CEO of the museum's Newseum Institute, which serves as a forum for First Amendment study, exploration and education; and president and CEO of the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation that supports education about the First Amendment.

Duff graduated magna cum laude from the University of Kentucky Honors Program in 1975 with a degree in political science and philosophy, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He also was a walk-on on the university's basketball team. After studying at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1974, he returned to the U.S. in 1975 and worked for four years as an aide in the chambers of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. He graduated from Georgetown Law School in 1981, then worked at the law firm Clifford and Warnke, where in 1990 he became a partner. In 1991, a large contingent of Clifford and Warnke lawyers and staff, including Duff, merged with the firm of Howrey and Simon, where he practiced antitrust, commercial litigation, and international trade until 1996.

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