Derailing Judges'
Junkets
While researching its report The
Takings Project: Using Federal Courts to Attack Community
and Environmental Protections, Community Rights Counsel discovered
that corporations and foundations were paying to bring
judges to resort locations to hear lectures that
emphasize property rights at the same time they are
bankrolling a wave of property rights cases in federal
courts, often before these same judges. CRC also
discovered that several non-profit organizations funded
exclusively by Philip Morris were funding a considerable
amount of oversees travel for federal judges.
These remarkable revelations have sparked a firestorm
of media attention. The Washington
Post broke the property rights junket story in
a front page expose that included a list of the 109
federal judges that had attended the seminars conducted
by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the
Environment (FREE). The Minneapolis Star Tribune
broke the story that Philip Morris has reimbursed five
federal judges for luxury, overseas travel at the same
time the company has filed lawsuits in federal courts
around the country challenging federal and state
regulation of tobacco.
CRC's research has also caused an outcry in the halls
of Congress. In particular:
- Representative
Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), at a House
Judiciary Committee hearing in June of this
year, called it "totally, totally
inappropriate for judges to be accepting freebie
trips" and commented "[t]here is
nothing more damaging to citizens' faith in the
country and in the due process of law than the
belief, even if inaccurate, that those who are
trusted to judge have been influenced by
financial connections."
- Representative
Barney Frank (D-MA), at the same hearing,
questioned why judges need to attend privately
funded educational seminars when the
taxpayer-funded Federal
Judicial Center offers non-biased educational
seminars on the same topics.
- The House
Appropriations Committee, in its report for
the 1999 Judiciary Appropriations Bill, demanded
that the Administrative
Office of the United States Courts conduct a
comprehensive review of the ethical issues raised
by privately funded judicial education and
travel.
Despite this wave of criticism, the federal judiciary
has yet to clarify for judges when it is and is not
appropriate for judges to accept expense paid trips. At
the most recent meeting of the Judicial
Conference (the judiciary's policy making body), the
judiciary made it a bit easier for the public to review
judge's public disclosures, but left the vague existing
standards for privately funded judicial education and
travel essentially unchanged. (For a Kansas City Star
report on the Judicial Conference Meeting click here
). The judiciary's foot dragging on this issue is,
perhaps, not that surprising. After all, the Chairman and
three other members of the Code of Conduct Committee
(which sets ethical standards for the Judicial
Conference) have attended FREE property rights junkets.
Representative David Skaggs (D-CO) blasted the Judicial Conference's
whitewashing of the issue. In a floor speech delivered on
October 13th, Congressman Skaggs accused the Judicial
Conference of permitting foundations and corporations to
"launder their gifts to judges by passing them
through a nonprofit foundation." Representative
Skaggs helped write the Appropriations Committee report language demanding a
comprehensive review of privately funded judicial
education and travel. His speech dismissed any questions about whether the Codes of
Conduct Committee report satisfied that demand. |
