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Monday, July 22, 2024
Federal Judges Are Mirroring the Supreme Court on Financial Disclosures
My new essay for The Hill has been in the queue since last Tuesday, and there has been a lot of news since then, so it is not about Biden, Harris, or Trump. But judges’ financial conflicts are still pretty important, and they continue to make poor excuses for non-compliance.
Here is the gist:
Federal judges are mirroring the Supreme Court on financial disclosures
There must be something about life tenure that makes it nearly impossible for federal judges to take responsibility for faults in their financial disclosures. The leading example is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who once claimed he had “inadvertently” failed to disclose 20 years of his wife’s employment.
Perhaps inevitably, the resort to implausible excuses and obfuscations appears to have filtered down to the trial courts.
One case involved Judge Lewis Liman, of the Southern District of New York, who presided over a multi-billion dollar antitrust case even though his wife held stock in Bank of America, the lead defendant.
He ruled in favor of Bank of America and the other defendants, dismissing the case in its entirety, without ever advising the parties of the stock holding.
Liman’s eventual disclosure of the financial conflict, coming months after he dismissed the case, was patently inaccurate.
You can read the rest of the story at The Hill.
Posted by Steve Lubet on July 22, 2024 at 12:32 PM | Permalink
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