After a letter to Congress stating that Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife’s business connections might be a conflict of interest, there are now more calls for the U.S. Supreme Court to be looked into further.
According to documents submitted to Congress and the Justice Department by a former colleague of Jane Sullivan Roberts, the chief justice may have ethical questions about Roberts’ job as a legal recruiter.
According to a letter the newspaper was able to obtain, the records show that she has received millions of dollars in commissions for placing attorneys at firms, including several that have business before the top court.
In the letter, Kendal Price argued that justices should be required to disclose more information about the employment of their spouses. He also expressed concern that a financial connection to law firms representing clients before the court might affect the justices’ objectivity or give the impression that it might.
“I do believe that litigants in U.S. courts, and especially the Supreme Court, deserve to know if their judges’ households are receiving six-figure payments from the law firms,” Price wrote in the letter.
The managing partner of Macrae’s Washington office, which represents lawyers looking to land positions at affluent companies, is Jane Roberts.
However, she and Price both had prior employment with the Maryland-based firm Major, Lindsey & Africa as legal recruiters. After being let go in 2013, Price sued the company, Jane Roberts, and another executive for wrongful termination but was unsuccessful.
But those legal proceedings resulted in the paperwork he gave to Congress and the Justice Department, which included spreadsheets displaying six-figure commissions credited to Jane Roberts from 2007 through 2014.
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Price’s letter revealed “troubling facts that once again demonstrate the need” for ethics reforms to “begin the process of rebuilding faith in the Supreme Court,” said Senator Dick Durbin, head of the Judiciary Committee, in a statement to the Times.
According to a Supreme Court spokesman, all of the judges adhered to income disclosure regulations and were “attentive to ethical limitations.”
The spokeswoman added that Roberts and his wife also looked at the rule of conduct for federal judges, which stated in 2009 that a judge “need not recuse solely because” his or her spouse has worked as a recruiter for a law firm with cases pending before the court.
However, the report has re-ignited calls for stricter disclosure guidelines and a court ethics code.
According to Gabe Roth, the executive director of the advocacy group Fix the Court, consulting “a decade-old advisory opinion written by lower court judges is not adequate.”
“Judicial spouses should of course have whatever jobs they want. But the public should have more information as to whether those jobs might pose a conflict to their wives’ or husbands’ judicial work,” he said.
Roth added: “What we need is for the Supreme Court to draft and adopt a comprehensive ethics code comprising a uniform set of principles that the justices can look to for guidance and that can set reasonable expectations for the justices’ conduct on and off the bench.
“We need more disclosure from judges and justices about spousal engagements that result in major paydays. And we need a neutral third party at the Court whose job it is to help the justices navigate their ethical responsibilities.”
Politico published a story in 2022 on the potential conflicts of interest that could arise from the work of some justices’ spouses and how the justices only reveal the jobs of their spouses, not the names of their clients or the amount of money they make.
A number of watchdog organizations, including Fix the Court, called on lawmakers to enact stricter disclosure laws in response to that report.
