Supreme Court Financial Disclosures Released - LER Bonus Content No. 14 (06.08.24)
Gifts include concert tickets, foreign travel, art work, and more
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Welcome to your fourteenth installment of bonus content from the Legal Ethics Roundup. In addition to the free weekly roundup every Monday morning, I regularly post bonus content for paid subscribers. However, for this bonus post I removed the paywall. Please feel free to share it widely with others.
Yesterday, the annual financial disclosures for US Supreme Court justices were due for public release. Eight met the deadline - one requested a 90-day extension. Can you guess who? (To be fair, this justice has been busy dealing with other ethics issues recently. In fact, he was the subject of a Bonus Content post last week — see LER Bonus Content No. 12.) Today’s post offers an overview of the disclosures and the analysis from commentators.
From Bloomberg Law reporter Kimberly Robinson and her colleagues Greg Stohr and Lydia Wheeler:
US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas belatedly confirmed luxury trips with GOP donor Harlan Crow, while new financial disclosures revealed his colleagues last year collected $1.5 million in book income and the singer Beyonce gave Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson a set of concert tickets. Jackson topped the book list with a $893,750 advance for her yet-to-be published memoir, followed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who reported receiving $340,000 after the court said this week he is working on a “legal memoir.” Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor also reported receiving book income. Jackson said that singer Beyonce Knowles-Carter gave her four concert tickets valued at $3,712. The newest justice also reported two gifts of artwork for her chambers valued at $12,500.
The disclosures come amid increased scrutiny of the nine justices and their financial dealings, fueled in large part by reports that Thomas took lavish vacations and private plane flights funded by Crow.
Read the full article here.
Nik Popli at Time Magazine also found the concert tickets “most interesting,” among other items, writing: “Financial disclosures for eight of the nine Supreme Court Justices were made public on Friday, revealing information about a gifted trip to Bali, free concert tickets to see Beyoncé, and nearly $1.6 million in book deals. The annual disclosures come as the court faces mounting pressure over its transparency and accountability measures, particularly concerning potential conflicts of interest and ties to affluent donors. A string of revelations in recent years about some of the Justices and undisclosed gifts has only intensified public scrutiny and raised questions about the impartiality of the judiciary.” Read more here.
These financial disclosures are the first to be revealed after extensive reporting from ProPublica and other media organizations about serious omissions from past filings for some justices. Recall that ProPublica reporters Josh Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski, and Kirsten Berg recently won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Supreme Court gifts and the lack of ethics accountability. (See LER No. 42, “Accountability in Our Democracy,” for more of my thoughts on that.)
Gabe Roth at Fix the Court has offered the most comprehensive analysis of the disclosures I’ve seen, both for what they contain and — importantly — for what they are missing. Here are some highlights from Fix the Court’s media release:
Four Supreme Court justices supplemented their income with payments from their book deals, three accepted money for teaching, and only two accepted any reportable gifts in 2023, according to financial disclosures released Friday. Justice Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension.
These disclosures are the first to be released since the Court announced its adoption of a Code of Conduct (Nov. 2023) and the first since the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation from ProPublica was published (Apr. 2023). Given the wide array of data in the reports, it's difficult to ascertain whether recent ethics scandals have changed the justices' behavior. In fact, there are some conflicting signs.
According to Thomas' disclosure, he did not accept any gifts of private plane travel or resort stays from Harlan Crow or any of his other prior benefactors in 2023. …
What's more, Thomas wrote at the end of his report that his 2019 FDR "is hereby amended to include the following entries under the reimbursement section, which was inadvertently omitted at the time of filing," and he lists a one-night stay at a hotel, with free food, in Bali and a four-day, three-night stay at Bohemian Grove (though he doesn't write "Bohemian Grove").
On the one hand, amendments like these show growth and are appreciated. On the other hand, ProPublica reported that Thomas flew to Indonesia on a private plane for his summer jaunt, and from this omission in the appendix, it appears that either Thomas made another error or he believes neither travel on a private plane owned by a friend (though it's really owned by his friend's company, HRZNAR, LLC) nor overnight stays on a yacht owned by a friend (really Crow Holdings, LLC) to be reportable.
Under the 1978 Ethics in Government Act and the 2023 Judicial Conference clarification, both are.
Read the full release here.
I recently read a proposal from Josh Blackman (South Texas College of Law) to place a statutory cap on earnings from book deals, but I don’t see revenues that justices might earn from sharing their stories and insights with the public as problematic, as long as earnings are disclosed and the justices recuse from matters related to their publishers. Here’s what Roth said on this point, and I agree with him: "Each justice would be capable of earning 10 times their current salary in the private sector, so it's reasonable for them to want to boost their income as authors, especially those with inspiring life stories. … This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don't see anything ethically compromising about it so long as the justices don't use their offices to hawk books, they speak to ideologically diverse audiences on their book tours, and they recuse from petitions involving their publishers."
Blackman’s proposal is among a list of ten reforms he advances in a new article called Bilateral Judicial Reform, and he concedes that “some of these proposals are off-the-wall, and are primarily intended to stimulate debate, rather than to create a decisive action plan” but his “hope is that through some outside-the-box thinking, [he] can put ideas into the ether that eventually coalesce into tangible proposals.” We certainly need more debate, outside-the-box thinking, and tangible proposals developed into decisive action plans for judicial reform, and I encourage you to read his article.
But back to the disclosures. Fix the Court has undertaken some excellent research to create a database of gifts received by justices over the past two decades, not just this year. Since 2004, justices have disclosed 350 gifts valued at $3,012,248. See Fix the Court’s gift list here. (Note that FTC’s data also includes a separate list with additional gifts that have been reported in the media but not disclosed by the justices.)
You can read the 2023 disclosure forms filed by the eight justices here, courtesy of SCOTUSblog.
As for Justice Alito’s disclosure, Fix the Court offers some things to look for once released: “When Justice Alito's disclosure comes out this summer, FTC will be looking to see if he received free travel to New York to speak to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, how many stocks he owns and if he traveled abroad at all, among other items.”
I'll be back Monday with another Legal Ethics Roundup. Until then, thanks for reading and have a terrific weekend!
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