Chief Justice John Roberts scolds judges for not recusing from cases posing financial conflict of interest
by Asher Notheis, Breaking News Reporter |
| December 31, 2021 10:23 PM
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts chided federal judges for not recusing themselves from cases posing a financial conflict of interest.
In his year-end report on the federal judiciary, Roberts addressed a series of articles published by the Wall Street Journal that found 131 federal judges participated in 685 matters involving companies in which they or their families owned shares of stock between 2010-18.
"Let me be crystal clear: the Judiciary takes this matter seriously," Roberts wrote. "We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards, and those judges violated an ethics rule."
Roberts acknowledged there was a high compliance rate. The 685 instances made up less than 0.03% of the 2.5 million civil cases analyzed by the Wall Street Journal. Roberts also noted how the newspaper found that 83 of the 131 judges had only one or two lapses in cases over the nine-year period, making these "isolated violations likely entailed unintentional oversights in which the judge’s conflict-checking procedures failed to reveal the financial conflict."
Still, Roberts called for more rigorous ethics training for judges. Some of the recommendations he suggested included "more classtime, webinars, and consultations," as well as using technology to check for conflicts of interest.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/john-roberts-argues-judges-stay-out-cases-financial-conflict-interest
