House Judiciary Committee Reports on “The Ethics of the Highest Court in the State of the Art” by J. Neil Gorsuch
The Senate Judiciary Committee hears testimony from a variety of people Tuesday, including a former attorney general and judicial ethics experts.
The committee will continue with their hearings even if the chief justice is not here, because it’s important for the Supreme Court to have such a code.
Last week, Politico reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t disclose the identity of the person who bought a $1.8 million property from him in Colorado. Gorsuch reported the transaction but not the identity of buyer, who turned out to be the head of a law firm that routinely has multiple cases before the Supreme Court.
And last week, Politico reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t disclose the identity of the person who bought property from him in Colorado — and turned out to be the head of a law firm that has multiple cases before the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court doesn’t follow the ethics code that applies to other federal courts. Hirono said that the lawmakers had wanted to ask Roberts why.
Several bills, including one introduced in February and another last week, would require the court to adopt an ethical code of conduct and establish a mechanism for examining potential violations, though they are not likely to advance in a split Congress.
Roberts did not testify last week but submitted a statement from all the justices who affirmed their voluntary compliance with the court’s ethics and practices.
“They are the highest court in the land, they should be held to the highest ethical standards,” she says. “And that is why we are having a hearing, because that’s not where the court is.”
The Judicial Conference Report on “Judge Shopping” in D.C.: The Case for the Texas Abortion Attorney’s Office
Roberts also noted in his letter that the Judicial Conference strengthened certain disclosure requirements, such as around free airplane trips and gifts from friends, just this year.
” When Chief Justice Roberts made his end-of-year report in 2021, he pointed out certain things they shouldn’t be doing, like judge shopping,” she says. “So I think that he opened the door, and acknowledges that there need to be some changes in how the judiciary operates.”
Judge shopping is the practice whereby plaintiffs deliberately file lawsuits in districts overseen by judges who they know will be sympathetic to their side. In recent weeks, the abortion drug was brought under renewed scrutiny by the Texas lawsuit.
The district court in D.C. hears a majority of challenges to federal agency action, and Hirono believes that their expertise will help ensure the decisions are based on the law.
The district court in D.C. will be the only court that will hear these cases and judge shopping will stop in Texas, where many divisions have only one judge.
The nine supreme court judges insisted that since they are different from other courts, they must remain independent from congressional oversight. And, they cited a variety of their exceptions to the rules followed by lower court judges.
Which is what brings us to the current state of affairs. It is not any one of the recent disclosures that has sent the court’s reputation into something of a tailspin. It is the cumulative effect — from the Thomas revelations, which ethics experts think is quite distinct–to the sum total of all the other stuff. Until there is some basic change, the press will continue to treat the court in the same way it treats the other branches of government. That said, at least the other branches have rules that they agree they are supposed to abide by, without exception.
Thomas ultimately blamed bad advice for these omissions. In a written statement he said that he had been advised by colleagues and others when he first came on the court that gifts from personal friends did not have to be disclosed. And he pledged to disclose them in the future.
Justices who make a living: Teaching and engaging with the community under the appellate bar: How the Supreme Court is dealing with the newspaper and media reports on Roberts’ case
This past weekend, Business Insider reported that Chief Justice John Roberts’ wife, Jane, made more than $10 million over a period of seven years as a headhunter recruiting and placing lawyers in law firms.
And on Sunday, The New York Times devoted a two-page spread to an account of how the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University upped its national ratings, in part by luring four conservative justices — Gorsuch, Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to teach at the Northern Virginia campus and during summer at flossy European tourist meccas, for which they were all paid.
The problem facing the court is indicative of the Times story. The code of conduct states that nothing is illegal or improper in the story, but a University of Virginia law professor believes the paid summer jobs are a cause for concern. She notes that judges are encouraged to teach and engage with the community under the code of conduct. The question she is asking is if it has to be at a European site.
As Frost observes, the appellate bar is a relatively small and “very clubby” group of people. Indeed, Supreme Court law clerks often maintain lifetime relationships with the justices for whom they clerked. Though they are forbidden to practice before the court for two years after leaving their clerkship, many of them become frequent advocates before the court after that, and on very rare occasion, a justice may slip up and call the counsel at the lectern by his or her first name. And yet, it is also worth noting that regular Supreme Court advocates can cite you chapter and verse of the times they lost the vote of a one-time boss, or won a vote unexpectedly.
In the aftermath of the unprecedented leak in the abortion case, the failure to find who did it, and an increasing drumbeat of stories about the justices’ outside activities and financial disclosures or failures to disclose, the court still seems wedded to the position it has always taken in recent years: Nothing is broken. We are doing our best. When we make mistakes, we can amend our financial disclosure forms and we do.
Stephen Vladeck argues that the media is an inspector general. And when justices are amending their prior financial disclosure statements in response to these media reports, it’s hard to just wave our hands and say ‘there’s nothing to see here.'”
After years of defending Supreme Court ethics, specialists in the field tend to have less tolerance these days. The court argues that it is different from the lower courts, because a different judge can be used in a case if one of the members recoges.
NYU’s Gillers finds that excuse laughable. After all, he notes, the Republican Senate blocked confirmation of President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland, leaving the court with just eight justices for almost a year, “and the sky didn’t fall.”
He believes that the high court could create a code for justices that acknowledges their unique role by using the current code of conduct for U.S. judges. He agrees that there can be a 4-4 tie on occasion, but that is less harmful than the harm that comes from the absence of a code of conduct for the court.
The judicial conference, which sets out the rules for all judges on financial disclosures needs to do a better job of explaining when gifts need to be disclosed or not. The current debate, he contends, is focused on disclosure of hospitality but “the greater problem is that there is no dollar limit on the value of personal hospitality, thus allowing a billionaire host to bestow on a justice” or any federal judge gifts without limit.