July 24, 2007
By Sarah Laskow
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2007 - Judges in the states' highest courts are required in all but three states to disclose some of their outside financial interests, a three-month study by the Center for Public Integrity has found. But these filings are rarely reviewed by the public, who may not even know they exist.
Center requests for copies of these documents were routinely met with surprise from the agencies that receive the filings. In some states, Center researchers were told that no one had ever asked to see the documents. All of the available filings are now on the Center's Web site. (See Document Warehouse.)
While legislative and executive ethics agencies have made their records increasingly accessible to the public, judicial disclosure forms can be hard to track down.
The three states that do not require judges to report personal financial interests are Idaho, Montana and Utah. Four states Alabama, Connecticut, Florida and Georgia keep some filings confidential. Three other states Alaska, Maryland and Nebraska require an in-person appearance to view or receive copies of the disclosures.
Forty-seven states have some sort of financial disclosure rules for these judges. They all require judges to report some type of non-judicial income, while 39 ask judges to report any officer or director positions the judges hold in organizations.
In 14 states, judges file disclosure forms similar to those required by governors and legislators. In 21 states, they use different filing forms.
In another 12 states judges must file more than one form of financial disclosure. In these states, the filings are required by state law and by the states' adopted version of the American Bar Association's Model Code of Judicial Conduct.
In 38 states, judges must participate in some type of election to win a seat on a state high court (most commonly called the Supreme Court), according to the American Judicature Society. The election can be non-partisan or involve political parties that nominate candidates. Some states follow a judicial appointment by the governor with a retention election, in which a judge appears on the ballot unopposed near the end of a term, and voters decide whether to keep the judge on the court.
"There [has been] an expectation that these elections should be a little bit different and a lot less contentious" than state legislative and gubernatorial races, said Rachel Weiss, communications director for the National Institute on Money in State Politics. But, she added, now "people are looking at judicial races as more political races."
Research by her group and New York University's Brennan Center for Justice from 1994 through 2006 shows increasing amounts of campaign contributions going to candidates in judicial races even in retention elections, in which there is no challenger as well as more money being spent on outside groups running political advertisements in state judicial races.
Information on judicial personal financial disclosures provides even more "data [people] can use to inform their lives and their views of the political world," Weiss said.
The Center studied the states' judicial financial disclosure practices using a survey similar to one it used to analyze disclosure requirements for legislative and executive branches. However, unlike its other surveys, the Center's judicial disclosure research did not grade the states on extent of disclosure for judges because of the state-to-state variations in judicial systems and ethics oversight.
The questionnaire asked about outside employment, officer/directorship, investments, clients, ownership of real property, family income and interests and public access to disclosure records.
Code of Judicial Conduct
In one aspect, judicial ethics were more uniform than other branches. Every state except Montana has adopted a version of the Model Code of Judicial Conduct.
But while the Model Code mandates disclosure of compensation for extrajudicial activities, as well as gifts, a few states adopted versions of the Code without requiring financial disclosure.
"The ABA's Model Code emphasizes that this sort of information should be made available," said Jan Baran, head of the election law and government ethics group at the Washington, D.C., law firm Wiley Rein LLP and a member of the ABA Joint Commission to Evaluate the Model Code of Judicial Conduct.
"This information should be available not just to the public, but it ought to be available to litigants and lawyers who may be appearing before those judges right now," he said.
The Model Code does not require judges to disclose investments or real estate holdings. Still, at present, 39 states require judges to report investments and 32 require reporting of real estate holdings. That compares to 45 and 35, respectively, for legislative disclosure and 45 and 37, respectively, for gubernatorial disclosure.
The Model Code does prohibit judges from practicing law and, therefore, having legal clients. However, 30 states ask judges to disclose clients.
Although the language of these codes is fairly consistent across the states, subtle variations in implementation make a difference.
For instance, New Jersey does not allow judges to receive compensation for teaching, which is one of the most common items reported on financial disclosures by judges in other states.
All the codes that mandate financial disclosure require that filing should occur "annually." In North Dakota and South Dakota, the annual filings are, in practice, sporadic. According to the Supreme Court clerks' offices in those two states, some judges feel that they need to file only if they have a new item to disclose.
Public access
Many agencies provided the documents to the Center at no charge. Unlike filings for legislators or executive branch officials, which often require advance payment and special requests, judges' filings were often received by fax or e-mail the same day they were requested.
The new Model Code of Judicial Conduct suggests that judicial disclosure be made available on court Web sites. According to the Center's survey, 13 states make judges' filings available via the Internet or e-mail.
Suzanne Blonder, senior counsel at HALT, an Organization of Americans for Legal Reform, which is dedicated to increasing accountability in the civil justice system, said that judicial disclosure rules should mirror requirements in the federal executive and legislative branches.
"In an era that embraces principles of sunshine and transparency, judges' public disclosure of their financial interests is critical to restoring Americans' confidence in the justice system," Blonder said. "Citizens should be able to review a judge's financial interests at the clerk's office at their local courthouse."
The Center's survey found two states that do not require financial interests to be reported by their governors or legislators but do require filings from their Supreme Court justices: Michigan and Vermont. Meanwhile, Utah requires disclosure only from its legislators and not from its governor or high court judges.
Idaho is the only state that does not require personal financial disclosures from officials in any branch of its government.
© 2007, The Center for Public Integrity. All rights reserved
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