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Monday, August 04, 2008
Courts - Still more on: The plot of John Grisham's latest novel may have already come to life in W. Va.
Updating this ILB entry from Feb. 19th, Marcia Coyle reports today in The National Law Journal that begins:
The ethical hornets' nest stirred up by the refusal of an acting West Virginia chief justice to recuse himself from a multimillion-dollar appeal involving his major campaign contributor has reached the U.S. Supreme Court in a petition framing today's increasingly unsettling intersection of money and judicial elections.The high court petition, fall-out from a bitter battle between competing coal companies, asks the justices to resolve "a recurring issue of far-reaching national importance." When, in the context of campaign contributions, does due process demand a judge's recusal? Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., No. 08-22.
"Although judicial elections -- and contributions to elected judges -- are a well-established means of selecting a state judiciary, there will be rare cases where campaign expenditures by a litigant create a constitutionally unacceptable appearance of impropriety. This is such a case," contends former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, co-chairman of the appellate and constitutional law group in the Washington office of Los Angeles' Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
As the amount of money poured into judicial elections skyrockets -- as documented by news and scholarly reports -- the number of instances in which a litigant or an attorney has contributed significant funds to a judge also will increase, and so too will recusal requests, said Olson, who represents Hugh Caperton, president of Harman Mining Co.
"A line needs to be drawn somewhere to prevent a judge from hearing cases involving a person who has made massive campaign contributions to benefit the judge," he said.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 4, 2008 08:23 AM
Posted to Courts in general