The federal trial judge works in a court system which is rapidly modernizing by developing central administrative structures and procedures to monitor and expedite his tasks. The new structures are creating new expectations for the federal judicial role. For the incumbent judge the demand to change his role definition and his pattern of action breeds tension and resistance. The Chandler case (1970), involving the sanctioning of a trial judge by his circuit judicial council, which Justice Douglas characterized as “the most controversial contest involving a federal judge in modern United States history,” epitomizes the stress upon a trial judge, nurtured in a period of mild bureaucracy, finding himself at the end of his career in an organization with new norms and stronger instruments of enforcement.