Rehnquist
Assails Curbs On Seminars for Judges; Business-Paid Events Called
'Valuable'
Washington
Post, May 15, 2001
by Edward
Walsh
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist launched a preemptive strike
yesterday against legislation that would restrict the practice of federal
judges attending educational seminars sponsored by business interests and
other private groups.
In a speech to the American Law Institute, Rehnquist described the
legislation as "antithetical to our American system and its tradition
of zealously protecting freedom of speech."
He said such seminars "are a valuable and necessary source of
education" for judges and that it is a "bad idea" to
restrict judges to attending only seminars that are approved and
underwritten by a government board.
Such a proposal "is contrary to the public interest in
encouraging an informed judiciary and contrary to the American belief in
unfettered access to ideas," Rehnquist said.
The legislation Rehnquist attacked is sponsored by Sens. John F.
Kerry (D-Mass.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.). It died in the last
Congress, but Kerry and Feingold intend to reintroduce it. In a statement
denouncing "judicial junkets," Kerry said yesterday that
"when our judges are lobbied on important legal issues by
corporations who regularly appear before them in federal court, the
appearance of conflict and the risk to public faith in the judiciary is
very real."
The Kerry-Feingold measure would authorize federal judges to attend
only seminars approved by the Board of the Federal Judicial Center, a
judicial agency that conducts educational programs for judges. It would
also provide funds to the center to pay the expenses of judges attending
approved seminars.
Federal judges came under increasing fire for going on
"junkets" last year when Community Rights Counsel, a public
interest law firm with strong ties to environmental groups, issued a
report detailing the extent of such trips, which it described as "a
veiled effort to lobby the judiciary under the guise of judicial
education."
The report said that between 1992 and 1998, 1,030 federal judges
went on 5,800 trips to privately funded seminars, many of them at luxury
resorts, and that "right-leaning, anti-regulatory organizations
dominate private judicial education."
Doug Kendall, executive director of Community Rights Counsel, said
a review of financial disclosure statements showed that more than 10
percent of federal judges who attended private seminars failed to report
them and that up to 90 percent of judges did not report all the required
information.
"He's trying to change the subject," Kendall said in
response to Rehnquist's speech. "The subject is the problem with
corporate-funded seminars for judges. Instead of addressing it, he's
essentially attacking the only people who are trying to do something about
it."
Rehnquist,
long a champion of higher salaries for federal judges, first took aim at
the Kerry-Feingold legislation in his annual report on the federal
judiciary issued on New Year's Day. He said then that the bill was a form
of "government censorship" that would effectively limit ideas
judges would be allowed to hear.
In his speech yesterday, Rehnquist said the bill "lays down a
vague standard" for deciding whether a seminar is acceptable for
judges to attend and that its effect "would be dramatically to
restrict the information made available to federal judges through seminars
by requiring that the content of that information and the identities of
its presenters be weighed against a prediction of public confidence in
fair-mindedness."
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