Conservative Judges Under Fire For Luxurious ‘Educational’ Trips

// Judicial watchdog group Fix the Court is out there doing the hard work of combing through federal judicial financial disclosures so you don’t have to. And you need to know what they’ve found.

In looking at the disclosures for appellate judges they found 31 judges have taken 76 privately funded luxury trips since 2021. These trips, ostensibly “educational seminars,” are problematic as Fix the Court notes in a letter to the Honorable Roslynn R. Mauskopf, Director of Administrative Office of the United States Courts, because they’re “becoming more overtly ideological and, in many cases, more closely resemble paid luxury vacations than opportunities to catch up on trends and innovations in the field.”

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We do not begrudge federal judges for wanting to stay at nice hotels, and we understand that there needs to be a draw to get judges on a plane. But there’s nice, and then there’s nice. From a survey of the seminars, one finds the destinations described as “Luxury Without Limits” (the Hawaii hotel where this seminar took place), an “Icon of Luxury & Refinement” (another Hawaii resort two judges stayed at) or a “ luxury resort getaway” (the Montana destination of this seminar).

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Fix the Court also calls attention to the weeklong Alyeska Colloquium sponsored by ASS Law and held at the luxury Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, Alaska. Besides the opulence of the trip, it also featured quite the slanted — and political — view of the judiciary.

The first day featured a talk on “bad” Supreme Court decisions, for which the suggested reading was an essay that ranked Obergefell and Griswold, respectively, as the fifth and sixth “worst” Supreme Court decisions of all time, even as both remain precedents the attendees are bound to follow. The third day featured Scalia Law Prof. Todd Zywicki speaking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency whose very existence he’s been deeply critical of and whose funding source remains a topic of federal litigation. The final presentation was from Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel, who unironically gave a talk titled “Media Attacks on Judges and the Campaign to Delegitimize the Judiciary” just months after referring to Justices Kagan and Sotomayor as “radical judges.”

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And that trip is not an outlier:

Also this past June, 22 judges—all but one of whom (Sutton) was appointed by President Trump—reported attending an “Originalism for Judges Seminar” sponsored by the Georgetown Center for the Constitution in Sarasota, Fla.,2 a city nearly 1,000 miles from GULC’s campus. (The 2021 and 2022 GCC originalism seminars, also held in Sarasota, hosted 14 and 21 Republican-appointed judges, respectively.) “Originalism,” as you know, is a method of legal interpretation that has gained popularity in the last few decades and is almost exclusively practiced by judges appointed by Republican presidents—and in political and policy-related cases almost always leads to conservative outcomes.

There may be a bit of a chicken vs. egg situation here, where the growing number of self-styled “originalist” judges calls for more “originalist” educational opportunities. However, seeing as how there appear to be few other judicial conferences devoted to a specific interpretive method, and with all of this method’s practitioners on one side of the ideological divide, we question whether such an event comports with ethical norms and the goals of legal education.

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Ultimately, Fix the Court urges Mauskopf to look at strengthening ethical standards for judges, specifically a review of these seminars to ensure they’re complying with the ethics code, and supplementing the disclosure requirement such that judges file post-trip reports listing costs and agendas, similar to the requirement for members of Congress.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].

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ASS Law, Courts, Fix the Court, Gabe Roth, Judicial Ethics