Tag: public confidence

Supreme Court leak investigation ends with no culprit identified

Portico_-US_Supreme_Court_Building

The full statement from the Court, with the Marshal’s report and an additional statement from Michael Chertoff (as an independent analyst for the Court), can be found here. The key takeaway: “the [Marshal’s] team has to date been unable to identify a person responsible [for the leak] by a preponderance of the evidence.”

Preponderance of the evidence is, of course, the lowest standard of proof, equivalent to a likelihood of just over 50 percent. The failure of the investigation to identify any specific person under the preponderance standard is a clear signal that the Court does not ever expect to find the perpetrator.

This meek result is almost as stunning as the leak itself. And it carries several important consequences:

    • The Supreme Court’s reputation takes another hit. Leave aside the cynical partisan attacks based on one or two case outcomes. The Court itself has too many self-inflicted wounds in recent years: its refusal to adopt a Code of Ethics, its refusal to broadcast video of its arguments, and so on. Increasingly, the Supreme Court looks like a 19th century institution that has been uncomfortably transported to the 21st century. The failure to find the source of the leak makes the entire institution look inept.
    • Other court systems will suffer reputational fallout as well. Most people do not carefully distinguish between the Supreme Court and other courts or court systems in their daily lives.  Just as a strong reputation for the apex court will have benefits for other courts downstream, a reputational blow to the nation’s highest court will have the public thinking a bit more dismally about court systems in their own localities as well.
    • The Supreme Court will necessarily be a less open place to work. The Marshal’s report recommended–and former Secretary Chertoff endorsed–a number of measures to assure that a leak like this does not happen again. Many of these recommendations involving restricting access to draft opinions and other key documents, and instituting greater confidentiality measures. Fewer people will see drafts, and fewer opportunities will be available for reflection. There will still be prestige in clerking or otherwise staffing at the Supreme Court, but one has to wonder whether some qualified candidates will pass on the opportunity if it means giving up one’s cell phone when walking into the building and knowing that someone is always looking over your shoulder.
    • The Court will have to contend with an internal culture of distrust, at least for the foreseeable future. Just as potential law clerks and staff will bristle at being watched more closely, the Justices themselves will ask whether it’s worth bringing in so many unproven people for a year or two. The increased security will also necessarily make it harder for Justices to hammer out issues among themselves, whether directly or through law clerks as intermediaries.
    • The Court is likely to become even more resistant to sensible transparency proposals. As this blog has routinely documented, both legislators and the general public have put forward a variety of proposals to make the Supreme Court’s work more transparent and accessible. These proposals include better recusal practices and livestreaming oral arguments. But now that the Court is feeling on the defensive, it seems highly unlikely that it will voluntarily accede to transparency measures. This doesn’t mean that transparency measures are not coming eventually–I am confident that they are–but only that the Court will try to delay introducing them until it feels overwhelming pressure to do so.

New Jersey courts struggle with judicial vacancies

New Jersey’s court system currently has 65 judicial vacancies, leading one lawmaker to propose raising the state’s mandatory retirement age for judges in order keep exising jurists on the bench.

Like many states, New Jersey currently requires its judges to retire at age 70. But a mandatory retirement system presumes that the state will quickly fill judicial seats as they become vacant. In fact, both Governor Phil Murphy and the state legislature have been slow to act on existing vacancies, creating a crisis so significant that nearly eighty retired judges have been temporarily called back into service to help clear the caseload backlog.

State Senator Shirley Turner is proposing raising the mandatory judicial retirement age to 75. It is a stopgap measure, to be sure. The only way to solve the crisis is for the other branches of state government to take their nomination and confirmation responsibilities seriously.

The situation in New Jersey perfectly illustrates the resource challenges that court systems must navigate in the 2020s. The heightened politicization of every aspect of American life has led the executive and legislative branches to treat each judicial vacancy as an zero-sum partisan event. (See the current kerfuffle in New York.) Meanwhile the courts, unable to secure the human resources they need to address their dockets and unable to control the flow of cases into the system, have to resort to recalls and other strategies to keep up with their workload. No wonder public confidence in every branch of government is in decline.

The leak

I wish I could give the stunning leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs its due today. For now, I will note that I agree with Bari Weiss’s take in its entirety, especially this part:

To my mind, though, the question of what this leak means for the institution of the Supreme Court is the most profound one. That is because it captures, in a single act, what I believe is the most important story of our moment: the story of how American institutions became a casualty in the culture war. The story of how no institution is immune. Not our universities, not our medical schools, not legacy media, not technology behemoths, not the federal bureaucracy. Not even the highest court in the land.

The Supreme Court was always the most cloistered governmental institution in America—the one where wisdom and precedent and reverence for our great constitutional tradition outweighed everything else. If there was something sacred that remained, this was it. Yes, there have been leaks from the Court before. But as Politico pointed out, last night’s leak was historic, and not in a good way: “No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.”

I called up one of the smartest professors I know at one of the top law schools in the country, and he echoed that: “To my knowledge, it’s never happened before in the modern history of the court. It is the most serious possible breach.”

Serious, severe, shocking, he said. But in the end, not surprising. Why not? Here’s how he put it: “To me, the leak is not surprising because many of the people we’ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing.”

What did he mean by that? “They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.”

He went on: “I’m sure this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don’t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.”

The Chief Justice has directed the U.S. Marshal to launch an investigation. This is a pivotal moment for the Court, as it works to quickly eradicate this source of institutional rot.

West Virginia governor will appoint the judge who will rule in his case

A strange development in West Virginia. State judge Charles King passed away last month, and Governor Jim Justice is charged with appointing his replacement. Interviews will be taking place this week. At the time of his death, Judge King was presiding over a lawsuit in which the Governor was the defendant. The new appointee will take the reins of that suit. Put differently, the Governor will literally be picking the judge in his own case.

While it is common for governors to temporarily fill vacant seats on the bench so that the courts remain at full strength, this situation is plainly awkward. It is all the more so because of the efforts in the mid-2000s of Massey Coal Company to heavily finance the election of Brent Benjamin to the state supreme court; Benjamin would later cast the deciding vote in Massey’s favor in a major case pending before that court.

Governor Justice must carry out his appointment responsibilities, but he would be well-served by including extra transparency in the process — for his sake, the new judge’s sake, and the sake of long-term public confidence in the state judiciary.

North Carolina Chief Justice election still undecided

More than a month after Election Day, the race to be Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court remains unsettled. Challenger Paul Newby won the original count over current Chief Justice Cheri Beasley by 406 votes. That lead dipped slightly after a machine recount, to 401 votes. Beasley then requested a manual recount in selected precincts, which is ongoing (and scheduled to be completed by December 14).

But the ancillary fights continue. Beasley has filed 87 protests across the state, conending that thousands of ballots were improperly disqualified. Newby has filed 14 protests of his own, arguing that hundreds of late-postmarked or otherwise invalid ballots were improperly counted.

After this episode, whoever wins — and it seems likely to be Newby — public confidence in the North Carolina Supreme Court as a fair and impartial body is almost certain to decline.

Ugly campaign tactics in upstate New York judicial race

Law.com reports on a campaign mailer sent to residents of Sullivan County, New York, which accuses a Democratic judicial candidate of being a socialist and favoring the legalization of drugs. Her Republican opponent has taken full credit for the mailer, which was designed to look like a local newspaper. The accused candidate has denied the allegations of socialism and drug legalization, and has filed a complaint with the state broad of elections.

Judicial candidates acting injudiciously.

 

For some state judges, lobbying is part of the job description

One of the most important themes of judicial interdependence is resource dependence. By conscious design, courts cannot produce or directly obtain many of the resources that they need to operate. These resources include immediate, survival-level needs like adequate funding and staffing, but they also include less tangible resources like public trust and legitimacy, and long-term needs like enabling legislation.

For better of for worse, most of the courts’ needed resources are in the hands of the legislature. Congress and state legislatures allocate funds to the judicial branch, determine the number of judges that the courts will have and the conditions upon which those judges will be selected, enact statutes granting courts jurisdiction to hear cases and authority to manage their internal affairs, and set the public tone in the way they treat the courts and individual judges.

So it should not be surprising to see judges directly asking legislatures for resources from time to time. The U.S. Courts submit a formal budget request to Congress every year, and on several occasions federal judges have testified before Congress on bills that affect the judiciary’s operations. And at the state court level, it is all the more prevalent. Many state chief justices provide a formal State of the Judiciary speech to their respective legislatures at the start of a new year, in which they lay out the work of the state courts over the previous year and lobby for resources to sustain or improve operations. That lobbying process may coincide with the speech, but often starts beforehand and continues long into the legislative session.

Consider New Mexico. Chief Justice Judith Nakamura will present her State of the Judiciary speech on Thursday, but she has already set the groundwork for the courts’ legislative “ask.” Several days ago, she sat down with the editors of the Albuquerque Journal. That access enabled the Journal to report, with considerable depth, that the state judiciary would pursue two constitutional amendments and several statutory changes in the upcoming legislative session. The constitutional changes would affect the timing of participation in judicial elections and the court’s ability to effectuate administrative transfers among courts. The statutory changes would set aside certain requirements with respect to appeals and jury service in order to make those processes more efficient. And of course, the courts are asking for additional funding for specific projects.

Chief Justices bear significant administrative responsibilities: they are the CEOs of their court systems as much as they are judges. In that capacity, a little legislative lobbying–and lobbying in the media–is very much fair game.

Walker to be new West Virginia Chief Justice

Justice Beth Walker has been chosen by her peers to be the next Chief Justice of West Virginia. Walker was cleared of impeachment charges by the West Virginia Senate earlier this month. She will face the important task of restoring public confidence in a court shaken by financial and fraud scandals over the past year.