As the Washington Post reports today, Community Rights Counsel (CRC) research revealed that at least 6 federal appellate judges ruled on the merits in 7 cases despite owning stock in one of the parties, in violation of federal law, 28 U.S.C. § 455(b).
CRC discovered these violations in a simple, and extremely limited, investigation. We obtained the publicly available 2003 financial disclosure forms for every active federal appellate court judge (there were 167 judges in our study) from the Administrative Office of the Unites States Courts.
We then completed a search in comparing the financial interests held by the judge with the names of parties listed in cases included in Westlaw’s federal case database. This search was identical to a search conducted by CRC in 1999 using 1997 disclosure forms.
John L. Coffey
Eric L. Clay
Martha C. Daughtrey
James L. Dennis
Harry Pregerson
Bruce M. Selya
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