Latest from judiciary office on junket rules: Oops!

On Wednesday we reported here on new criticism by the Community Rights Counsel that the federal judiciary is "slow-walking" implementation of new rules set by the Judicial Conference last September to make judges' participation in privately-funded seminars more transparent. Nothing had yet been posted on the judiciary web site about individual judges' trips or about the host organizations, as envisioned by the new rules.

Just hours after the CRC report was issued, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts did a rare thing: it confessed error, releasing a statement acknowledging that the procedure it devised to implement the new rules "does not appear to be consistent with the Conference’s policy." Under new procedures information about host organizations will be posted online soon, even before judges take trips.

CRC also targeted George Mason University's Law & Economics Center, describing it as an "ExxonMobil-funded junketing organization" that gives judges a corporate slant on punitive damages and other issues. "There's no story there," the center's director Francis Buckley responded today. ExxonMobil's donations are a tiny percentage of the budget of the center, whose programs are "purely academic," Buckley says. "We don't talk about hot-button issues."

Comments

[Doug Kendall]

LEC is entitled to its own opinion about whether there is a story associated with its funding from Exxon, but not its own facts. As Community Rights Counsel's on-line report, EXXON, PUNITIVE DAMAGES, AND JUDICIAL JUNKETS, available at www.communityrights.org/Newsroom/crcNewsReleases/Exxon%20Release%203_21_07.asp), documents, LEC's program schedules show that at a 2004 LEC program, Kip Viscusi, a law professor who has received funding from Exxon for his work on punitive damages, required judges to read two chapters of a book he co-authored, and Exxon funded, called "Punitive Damages, How Juries Decide." The topic of punitive damages is certainly a "hot-button" one for ExxonMobil and for the thousands of fisherman who lost their livelihoods in the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And while LEC may view the $215,000 they received from ExxonMobil from 1998-2005 as small potatoes, that money pays for a lot of judicial junkets.