Property Rights Junkets
Raise Ethical Issues, Reforms Necessary
At an Oversight Hearing for the Administrative
Office of the United States Courts, Community Rights Counsel (CRC)
joined members of the House Judiciary
Committee in calling for action by the Administrative
Office to ensure that judges do not attend educational
seminars where a source of funding for the seminar is
involved in litigation. Doug
Kendall, CRC's Executive Director, commented:
Judges obviously
need clearer instruction that they should not attend
educational seminars where a source of funding is
involved in litigation, and more information about
the sources of funding of judicial seminars. The
Administrative Office is uniquely positioned to
provide this instruction and assemble this
information.
Corporations and conservative foundations are paying
to bring federal judges to resort locations to hear
lectures that emphasize property rights at the same time
they are bankrolling a wave of property rights cases,
often before the same judges.
Community Rights Counsel chronicles these
"junkets for judges" in a major investigative
report released in May entitled: The
Takings Project: Using Federal Courts to Attack Community
and Environmental Protections. That report
documents that the junkets are just a small part of a
highly successful, 15-year campaign by corporate
interests and conservative legal activists to promote
judicial activism and use the federal court system to
thwart a wide range of health, safety and environmental
protections.
Community Rights Counsel commends Congresswoman Zoe
Lofgren (D-Ca) and other members of the Subcommittee
on Courts and Intellectual Property for raising
concerns about the seminars with the Administrative
Office. CRC hopes this Oversight Hearing triggers
meaningful reforms by the Administrative Office that
address the very serious appearances of impropriety
stemming from the funding sources of judicial seminars.
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