The Senate will hear testimony on Supreme Court ethics
The House Judiciary Committee’s Call for an Ethics Code of Conduct in the Highest Court, and Why Chief Justice Roberts Came to the Supreme Court
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Supreme Court ethics reform on Tuesday, as questions continue to swirl about the business dealings of several justices.
If the chief justice shows up or not, the committee will still go forward with the hearings, which will be attended by ethical experts.
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. The head of a law firm that has many cases before the Supreme Court was the buyer, but he wasn’t reported.
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 does not follow the ethics code that applies to other courts. Hirono says that lawmakers had wanted to ask Roberts why he did that.
A number of bills that require the court to adopt an ethical code of conduct and establish a mechanism for investigating potential violations are not likely to move forward in a split Congress.
The importance of preserving Judicial independence and concerns about separation of powers were cited as reasons for Chief Justice John Roberts declining to testify. The letter was accompanied by a joint statement from all the current justices affirming their voluntary adherence to the code of conduct for judges of the federal court.
She says that the highest court in the land should be held to the highest ethical standards. “So that’s why we’re having a hearing, because it’s not where the court is.”
The Supreme Court is not the only court where judges are supposed to treat the law, but the courts are the only courts. Justice Roberts is concerned about the impact of recent judge shopping
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 noted that there were certain things that they shouldn’t be doing, such as judge shopping,” she adds. I think he acknowledges that there need to be changes in how the judiciary operates.
There is a practice called judge shopping in which defendants deliberately file lawsuits in districts overseen by judges who will be sympathetic to their side. In recent weeks, the Texas lawsuit has brought renewed scrutiny to the drug.
Hirono believes that the district court in D.C. is the only court that can hear immigration and campaign finance challenges and so they will ensure that decisions are based on the law.
“So it would create a way that only the district court in D.C. will hear these cases, and will stop judge shopping in places like Texas, where 20 of the 27 divisions there [have] only one judge, which makes it really easy to judge shop.”
The nine essentially insisted that the Supreme Court is different from other courts and that they must remain free from oversight or mandatory rules. Some of the exceptions that they cited to the rules were followed by lower court judges.
Which brings us to the current state of affairs. The court’s reputation has been damaged by recent disclosures, but it is not due to any of them. The cumulative effect is what ethics experts think is distinct to the sum total of all other things. The press won’t stop treating the court in the same way it treats the other branches of government until there is some basic change. 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.
When Justices Met Their Lawyers: “It’s All Listed”: The Case of the Antonin Scalia School of Law
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.
On Sunday, The New York Times devoted a two-page spread to the story of how the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University increased its national ratings in part by getting four conservative justices to teach there.
The Times story, like some of the others, is indicative of the problem facing the court. According to the code of conduct, there isn’t nothing illegal or improper about the paid summer jobs that were reported in the story. She points out that judges are encouraged to teach and engage with academics under the code of conduct. She asked why it needs to be at a European site.
The appellate bar is a fairly small 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. We amend our financial disclosure forms when we make mistakes.
University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck argues that “the media is serving as a de facto inspector general. It is difficult to wave our hands and say there’s nothing to see when justices are amending their financial disclosure statements.
After years of defending Supreme Court ethics, specialists in the field tend to have less tolerance these days. The court believes that it’s not the same as the lower courts because if one of the members of the court leaves a case, there could be a 4-to-4 tie.
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 maintains that, using the current code of conduct for U.S. judges as a guide, the high court “in half a day” could write a code for the justices that recognizes the court’s unique role. He agrees that there can be a 4-4 tie, but that is less harmful than the harm from not having a code of conduct for the court.
And he says, the judicial conference, which sets out the rules for all judges on financial disclosures has to do a better job of explaining when gifts and personal hospitality need to be disclosed or need not be disclosed. 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.
