FINANCIAL DISCLOSURES, ON TIME AND ONLINE | Justices Selling Off Stocks, Owning Less So They Can Do More
June 15, 2018
SHOW ME THE MONEY
|Yesterday, we learned about new SCOTUS financial disclosures that show stock sell-offs and several outside revenue streams for the justices. The reports indicate the three Supreme Court justices who own individual securities shed up to $360,000 from their portfolios last year, while JUSTICE GORSUCH pocketed up to $500,000 from selling his Colorado vacation home, and JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR netted $117,500 in book advances. Fix the Court reports on the justices’ 2017 financial disclosure reports and Executive Director GABE ROTH notes of the reports, “On time, digitally released financial disclosure reports with a continued trend of stock sell-offs? We’ll take it.”
GOING GOING GONE
|Richard Wolf with USA Today also reports on the financial disclosures and writes, “Only three justices own individual stocks, a practice that occasionally forces them to recuse themselves from cases. All three — CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS and JUSTICES SAMUEL ALITO and STEPHEN BREYER — reduced their holdings in 2017.” Pointing to Fix the Court’s report, Wolf notes that the three justices now own 44 companies, down from 76 in 2014.
BROUGHT THAT OLD THING BACK
|Yesterday SCOTUS revived a price-fixing case against Chinese vitamin C makers, throwing out a lower court ruling that had allowed two Chinese vitamin C makers to escape $148 million in damages for violating American antitrust law. The justices ruled unanimously that the lower court was too deferential to the Chinese government. JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG wrote for the court that while U.S. courts should provide “respectful consideration” to a foreign government’s interpretation of its own law, they are not “bound to accord conclusive effect to the foreign government’s statements.”
A PLEASANT SURPRISE
|“Not every Supreme Court decision about elections is a disaster, and the ruling in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky striking down Minnesota’s very broad ban on wearing political apparel in polling places is a pretty good one.” That’s Richard Hasen writing in Slate about yesterday’s SCOTUS decision. He explains why the ruling deserves praise for providing a “much broader and more functional approach.” Hasen concludes, “This is not the biggest election case of the season. We are still waiting on the partisan-gerrymandering decisions and a Texas redistricting case. We also just got a bad decision on voter purges. But at a time when I expect the worst from the Supreme Court, Mansky is a bit of a pleasant surprise.”
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times weighs in on the voter apparel decision by both suggesting the high court was right to strike down vagueness in the Minnesota law, and also noting it didn’t go far enough in affirming free speech at the polls. “Even at a polling place authorities ought to allow voters to wear clothing expressing their point of view — even about the election — so long as they don’t accost their fellow voters or attempt to proselytize or hand out literature. That strikes us as a more reasonable way to balance self-expression and the state’s interest in an orderly election process.”
BROOKLYN REPRESENT
|There’s a 96-year-old Brooklyn judge who’s going toe to toe with the Supreme Court, hoping to rein in some of their recent decisions in order to improve the public’s power to hold the police accountable for misconduct and abuse. Alan Feuer writes in The New York Times, “In a spirited decision issued Monday, the judge, JACK B. WEINSTEIN, argued that the justices had gone too far in a pair of recent rulings expanding qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects law-enforcement officers from being sued for actions they perform on the job. Judge Weinstein complained that the broadened doctrine now protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent.'”