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Over 100 Federal Judges Heard Cases Despite Conflicts Of Interest

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Nearly 700 federal court cases from 2010 to 2018 were heard by 131 judges who had financial ties to a company that was part of the case, the Wall Street Journal reported, and in two-thirds of those cases they ruled in favor of the company. KEY FACTS Some 131 federal judges heard 685 cases in which they or family members held stock in a company involved in the case, the Journal reported Tuesday. After being contacted by the Journal, 56 of the 131 judges had their staff begin to tell people in 329 lawsuits that the judge should have recused themselves. In 21 cases, a judge or family held more than $50,000 in stock of a company involved in the litigation, while in 173 cases the holdings were higher than $15,000. Rodney Gilstrap, the chief federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas, led his peers with 138 cases in which he had a conflict of interest. New judges could be assigned to those cases—potentially changing the ruling—and some people who lost cases have already asked for that, the Journal reported. Key Quote “If you are a federal judge, you should not be holding individual stocks,” said Andrew O’Connor, whose suit against Comcast was sent to a state court—a development favored by the company—by Judge Lewis Babcock, of the U.S. District Court of Colorado. At the time, Babcock or his family owned at least $15,001 in Comcast stock and may have owned as much as $50,000. For his part, Babcock said “I dropped the ball.” His office did not have an adequate process for checking for conflicts of interest, he said. Chief Critic The report “raises a more systemic problem of judges chronically neglecting their duty to disqualify in such… Read More

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Federal judges’ financial conflicts add to mistrust of the judicial system

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Zero Accountability over 700 Judges Violations of Law on Conflicts

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that over the last decade, 131 federal judges failed to recuse themselves in hundreds of cases that involved their own financial interests. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, in his year-end review of the federal judiciary, said the report’s findings indicate a “serious problem of inadequate ethics training,” especially for those judges who had numerous violations. The conflicts of interest primarily include judges hearing cases involving their or their families’ stock holdings, which ultimately tainted some 685 court cases. Given the rising concerns that the federal judiciary is becoming increasingly politicized, the newspaper’s findings are deeply troubling, says Martha Davis, university distinguished professor of law at Northeastern, adding that the violations only “compound the lack of trust that the federal judiciary seems to be breeding.” “What’s at stake here is a lot,” Davis says. “We have a judiciary for various reasons already losing the trust of the American people, and the evidence that federal judges are hearing cases that they have a direct financial interest in only makes things worse.” One of the primary mechanisms for alerting the courts about potential conflicts is through software that screens for them. The computerized system itself was implemented after a 2006 Washington Post investigation discovered a rash of ethics violations in the federal courts. But the more recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that the software isn’t foolproof, requiring more awareness from judges. “Judges are expected to know themselves, and not to rely on some kind of mechanism or computer system” to catch these conflicts, Davis says. “And they’re supposed to be aware of what their own assets are.” The Journal reports that some of the judges who hadn’t recused themselves in the cases… Read More

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