ORIENTATIONS

note color below

new category, 9/14 but old concept:

see FREE judge dude ranch; Mercatus; staffers and newly elected pols

see junkets, dude

Left has no equivalent?

dormant till CPI?

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GMU

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in recent years, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has been in hot water over his failure to disclose luxury junkets paid for by far-right billionaire donors. But a new report shows that federal judges across the country are effectively doing the same thing, with little to no accountability.

A Wednesday report by National Public Radio (NPR) found that dozens of federal district and circuit court judges — appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents — are routinely failing to file timely financial disclosure reports as required by law. Ethics experts say that the timely filing of financial disclosure reports is important for plaintiffs and civil defendants, who may want to request a judge recuse themselves if they see that judge attended an event paid for by a special interest group with a case before the court. Those disclosure forms are then posted to every federal court's website.

"It also matters to the public, even if someone never shows up in a courtroom, to believe in the integrity of our judiciary and to trust in the decisions that are issued by judges," University of Houston Law Center professor Renee Knake Jefferson told NPR. "Having disclosures of judicial financial interests goes directly to the public having confidence in the outcomes of the decisions — that they are free of any bias or influence."

"The public has a right to know whether or not its top legal officials have any potential conflicts going into hearing cases," said Gabe Roth of the nonprofit group Fix the Court. "Sometimes they're small bore, but a lot of the times they have major national impact."

NPR's Tom Dreisbach and Carrie Johnson reported that despite judges being expected to file a public report disclosing any events they attended in which their costs of participation were covered by an outside entity, many jurists have failed to do so for months or even years.

"That information loses most of its value if it's a year and a half later," said Kedric Payne, who is the senior director of ethics at the anti-corruption watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. "It's just too distant from the potential conflict of interest."

One of the more notable members of the federal judiciary who failed to file timely disclosure reports is U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida, whom former President Donald Trump appointed to the bench in 2020. Cannon — who is overseeing Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case — attended several seminars at a luxury resort in Montana, but didn't post her disclosure forms online until NPR's inquiry. Clerk Angela Noble attributed the late disclosure to "technical issues."

"Any omissions to the website are completely inadvertent," Noble said.

Many of the seminars judges attend are funded by well-heeled far-right groups with extreme ideological agendas. NPR reported that "dozens" of federal judges attended a 2022 event at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School — named for the Ronald Reagan-appointed Supreme Court justice — featuring a speech by European Parliament member Gunnar Beck. Beck is with the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) party, which has called for the mass deportation of migrants and refugees.

Millions of Germans have been protesting AfD for months, criticizing the party as a rebirth of the Nazi movement. NPR noted that Beck posted photos of Black families in a social media post he has since deleted, condemning the "Afrikanisierung" ("Africanization") of Germany. He also lamented that Germany's welcoming of immigrants means the country "has no future as an industrial and cultural nation, but it does have a future as a welfare office."

Click here to read NPR's full report.

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"Any omissions to the website are completely inadvertent," Noble said.

Click here to read NPR's full report.

Many judges fail to fully disclose free luxury trips, NPR finds : NPR

Dozens of federal judges failed to fully disclose free luxury travel to judicial conferences around the world, as required byinternal judiciary rules and federal ethics law, an NPR investigation has found. As a result, the public remained in the dark about potential conflicts of interest for some of the United States' top legal officials.

Federal judges — occasionally with family members or even their dog in tow — traveled to luxury resorts in locations as far-flung as London; Palm Beach, Fla.; Bar Harbor, Maine; and the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park for weeklong seminars. The judges received free rooms, free meals and free money toward travel expenses, together worth a few thousand dollars.

LAW

Victims of harassment by federal judges often find the judiciary is above the law

At one event, a far-right German politician with a history of racially inflammatory and anti-immigrant statements made a presentation to dozens of judges. At others, judges heard from an advocacy group that uses lawsuits in federal court to change environmental policy, as well as from corporate CEOs in the oil and pharmaceutical industries.

For almost two decades, the federal judiciary has recognized that the combination of apparent luxury and ideological content can present the appearance of undue influence on the courts. In response, the judiciary has required more transparency in the form of public disclosure.

An NPR investigation found that the disclosure systems often fail to give the public timely information about the outside benefits that judges receive and from whom.

As a result, judicial ethics experts say, people with cases before these judges lack important information about a judge's potential biases. That information, if received in time, could be used to request that a judge recuse from a particular case.

"It also matters to the public, even if someone never shows up in a courtroom, to believe in the integrity of our judiciary and to trust in the decisions that are issued by judges," said Renee Knake Jefferson, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. "Having disclosures of judicial financial interests goes directly to the public having confidence in the outcomes of the decisions — that they are free of any bias or influence."

Many judges defend these events as helpful forums to discuss important issues, and they reject criticism that a stay at a fancy hotel could influence their decisions. Critics call them "junkets" and glorified vacations that reward ideological allies.

Both sides agree that disclosure is needed.

There are two primary ways the public can view information about judicial education events and see which judges attended: One disclosure is filed soon after the event, and the other is submitted much later.

First, within 30 days of an event, judges are required to file a form that details the host of the event and the entities that provided funding, as well as the speakers and topics of discussion. This form, called a "Privately Funded Seminar Disclosure Report," is posted on every federal court's website.

Second, federal law requires that judges report the reimbursements they received for the events on an annual financial disclosure report. That report also includes information like alternate sources of income (such as a book deal or teaching job) and what stocks a judge might own. Those reports are eventually posted on a centralized online database maintained by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

By closely examining the portion of these events subject to public records laws, NPR identified problems with both systems.

In nearly 40 instances, judges attended events at luxury resorts but failed to properly file a report within 30 days. In fact, the forms were uploaded months or even years late and only after NPR began asking questions.

In 13 cases, NPR found that judges failed to declare the benefits they received on their annual financial disclosure forms.

NPR contacted all those judges for comment.

And in another dozen cases, judges' financial disclosures for 2021 or 2022 were simply unavailable to the public. By all accounts, judges are filing those annual disclosure reports on time. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts bears responsibility for posting those reports online and has acknowledged delays in getting the system up to date.

There is no indication that the judges intentionally withheld information in order to deceive the public. And the office that administers the annual financial disclosure website told NPR that it struggles to work through a backlog of reports, as well as requests for redactions to protect judges' safety, but is making progress.

Ethics experts said delays and omissions in these reports undermine the entire purpose of the transparency rules.

"That information loses most of its value if it's a year and a half later," said Kedric Payne, the senior director of ethics at the nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center. "It's just too distant from the potential conflict of interest."

Regardless of intention, the result is that the public is kept in the dark. And NPR's findings likely represent an undercount of the larger problem.

Events with ideological presentations and a side of luxury

Nonprofits, legal organizations and private universities all host judicial education events around the world. But those groups are generally not subject to public records laws. As a result, their full attendee lists are shielded from public scrutiny.

When it comes to the hosts of these events, George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., is exceptional in two ways.

George Mason University's campus in Fairfax, Va., in 2018.

Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

For one, GMU — particularly the university's conservative-leaning Law & Economics Center — has long stood out as one of the most prolific hosts of judicial education events. Collectively, hundreds of judges have attended the university's events at luxury resorts over the years. GMU is quick to point out that the events are paid for by private donors. The Law & Economics Center's website lists donors that include major corporations like Amazon, Pfizer, Google and Facebook, as well as the business lobby group the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to the New York Times, conservative activist Leonard Leo helped gather $30 million in donations to rename the law school after late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

GMU is a public university in Virginia, which means it is subject to the state's Freedom of Information Act. NPR requested attendee lists for eight of its judicial education events from 2021 to 2023. By comparing attendee lists with the publicly available records, NPR was able to identify dozens of missing disclosures.

IFrame Content

That missing information may be relevant to both the public at large and people with cases in front of these judges.

For example, dozens of judges took part in a 2022 event that featured a speaker from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) political party. Germany has been rocked by massive protests in recent months over revelations about AfD's ties to right-wing extremism. A regional AfD leader is facing charges in Germany for allegedly using Nazi slogans, which he denies.

Gunnar Beck, a member of the European Parliament and an AfD member, spoke to the group of American federal judges about "European Jurisprudence." Beck has a history of anti-immigrant and racially inflammatory statements.

In 2021 — the year before his presentation to the judges — Beck took multiple photos of Black families, including young children in strollers, and posted them on social media. In one of the posts, he used the photo to criticize what he called the Afrikanisierung(Africanization) of Germany. (This post was deleted after NPR contacted Beck.) In another, Beck wrote that due to immigration, "Germany has no future as an industrial and cultural nation, but it does have a future as a welfare office."

Beck told NPR in an email that "each country and its people have a right to control their border with a view to safeguarding their maintenance of their national culture and identity" and that "I do not think these views are either fascist or racist."

The GMU events have also featured presentations from a nonprofit that says it uses lawsuits to promote a pro-market, as opposed to pro-regulation, approach to environmental policy; the CEO of a U.K.-based pharmaceutical company; and the CEO of an energy company that is currently suing the federal government over financial regulations.

One recent event included a reading assignment on the "worst decisions ever handed down by the Supreme Court" as defined by conservative and libertarian legal scholars.Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, was No. 2. Landmark cases establishing rights to same-sex marriage and the use of birth control also appeared among the top 10 "worst" decisions.

Given the power of judges to affect Americans' lives on issues from guns to abortion, the environment and crime, transparency about these events is critical, said Gabe Roth of the nonprofit watchdog group Fix the Court.

"The public has a right to know whether or not its top legal officials have any potential conflicts going into hearing cases," said Roth. "Sometimes they're small bore, but a lot of the times they have major national impact."

The agendas for the GMU events showed that the event programming often ended around noon, followed by a five- or six-hour "study break." In some instances, the agendas leave days completely free.

It's unclear exactly how judges spent that time. But attendees had the opportunity to enjoy the Ritz-Carlton's clay tennis courts, the Alyeska Resort's Nordic Spa or the short walk to Buckingham Palace from the May Fair Hotel in London. The agenda for GMU's 2022 Bar Harbor Colloquium in Maine reserved 90 minutes for a wine tasting.

The Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, Alaska, in 2009.

John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

A spokesperson for GMU did not respond to NPR's specific questions for this story.

"Topics are selected based on foundational concepts in the economic analysis of law relevant to judges and other areas of interest to the judiciary," wrote Ken Turchi, associate dean of GMU's Antonin Scalia Law School, in an email. "Every judge who attends has the option to complete and submit a disclosure form detailing expenses incurred and reimbursed."

Which judges have disclosure problems?

Problems plagued the paperwork for judges appointed by presidents of both major parties going back decades, including Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

And the judges who failed to fully comply with the disclosure requirements include some notable names.

In this screenshot, Aileen Cannon speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee nomination hearing to be a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Florida on July 29, 2020. She was appointed to the position later that year.

U.S. Senate via AP

Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida is presiding over former President Donald Trump's criminal trial for allegedly mishandling classified documents. Cannon, herself a Trump appointee, attended two seminars at a luxury resort in Montana, but the privately funded seminar disclosures for both events were not posted online until NPR began making inquiries. Clerk of court Angela Noble told NPR in an email that the absence of the disclosures was due to technical issues and that "Any omissions to the website are completely inadvertent."

Judge Robert Conrad is the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

U.S. Courts

Judge Robert Conrad is the current director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which implements the policies of the federal judiciary. Conrad, who was appointed by George W. Bush to the Western District of North Carolina, attended three privately funded seminars from 2021 to 2023. He later included the events on his annual financial disclosure but did not file a publicly available disclosure for any of those events within the required 30-day time limit. "He inadvertently did not make the additional disclosure in the separate system for private seminar attendance," said Peter Kaplan, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office. "Judge Conrad appreciates your bringing this oversight to his attention."

Judge Leslie Gardner of the Middle District of Georgia, who is the sister of prominent Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, also failed to file a privately funded seminar disclosure on time. Additionally, NPR found that Gardner omitted the reimbursements she received for lodging, meals and travel on her annual financial disclosure. In a phone call to NPR, clerk of court David Bunt said that Gardner, an Obama appointee, was updating her annual financial disclosure and privately funded seminar disclosure, which were incomplete due to an "oversight."

"I don't have really an excuse for it, and I'm going to correct it"

Judges contacted by NPR largely described the issues with their disclosures as the result of an "inadvertent oversight" or an "accident." In a handful of cases, court clerks blamed technical issues with the online system for uploading paperwork. One judge appeared to be unaware of the requirement to file a disclosure report within 30 days. Several judges thanked NPR for contacting them and prompting them to update their disclosure reports.

"It looks like we blew it," said Judge Philip Gutierrez of the Central District of California in a phone call to NPR. Gutierrez failed to file a disclosure within 30 days of attending a judicial seminar at The Breakers, a resort in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2021. "I apologize. It's important. I'm embarrassed."

Gutierrez immediately uploaded the missing disclosure.

Judge Gary Fenner of the Western District of Missouri attended the same GMU 2021 seminar in Palm Beach but failed to file a privately funded seminar disclosure and omitted the event from his annual financial disclosure that year.

"I am really surprised that I did not report that," said Fenner, an appointee of Bill Clinton, in a phone message to NPR. "I'm going to rectify it. I'm embarrassed about the fact that somehow that was overlooked by me. But I don't have really an excuse for it, and I'm going to correct it."

Judge Keith Starrett of the Southern District of Mississippi, a George W. Bush appointee, said he had thought he marked his attendance at GMU's seminar at the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort and Spa in Colorado in 2021 on his annual financial disclosure. He acknowledged that it was missing from the forms due to an "oversight."

"I'm going to do whatever I need to do to get it right," he said by phone.

In the District Court for the Southern District of Texas, NPR found three judges — Jeffrey Brown, Andrew Edison and Charles Eskridge — who had not filed the required privately funded seminar disclosure forms. After NPR contacted the court, the judges uploaded the forms, and clerk of court Nathan Ochsner said in an email, "At the direction of Chief Judge Randy Crane, my office will routinely remind all [Southern District of Texas] judges of this reporting requirement."

Meanwhile, the delays in getting access to annual financial disclosure reports appear to be the result of the time limits built into the transparency laws, as well as a combination of long processing times for redactions requested by judges and, in some cases, security concerns.

The law requires that judges file their annual financial disclosure reports for the previous year on May 15. Many judges request and receive a 90-day extension, pushing that deadline to mid-August. Judges can then request that the judiciary redact "personal or sensitive information that could directly or indirectly endanger" the judge or the judge's family, but then a committee has to review the request.

"So if you're a judge that asked for a 90-day extension and then, on top of that, you're asking for redactions," said Roth, of Fix the Court, the public release of the annual disclosure is "already well into the following year."

Former federal Judge Jeremy Fogel, who is now the executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, evaluated some of these redaction requests when he served on the judiciary's Committee on Financial Disclosure.

"I don't think that the problem you described is one where the judiciary doesn't want to share the information," said Fogel. "I think the problem is that they have not been able to put the resources in place to get the information online and available to the public in a timely manner."

The Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, D.C., houses the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Andrew Harnik/AP

NPR sent a list of judges to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and asked why their annual financial disclosures for 2021 or 2022 were still unavailable. Kaplan, the Administrative Office spokesperson, said he "could not comment on specific judges' filings." In general, Kaplan blamed missing disclosures on backlogs in the system and reviews of filings for possible security issues.

"Currently, nearly all filings from 2021 and more than 80% of the filings from 2022 are available on the database," said Kaplan. "We are continuing to cut into the backlog of reports."

An ongoing debate over judges and luxury trips

Even if judges universally filed their disclosure reports on time and if the federal judiciary sped up the release of information, it would likely not end the ongoing debate over judges getting thousands of dollars in free perks, especially at ideologically slanted conferences.

Fogel said that in his time as a judge, he tended to avoid events that might be perceived as ideological.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's unethical," said Fogel. "But I think it's better — it's a best practice — for judges to avoid programs that have a particular philosophical or ideological viewpoint."

Judge Starrett, of the Southern District of Mississippi, has attended five GMU legal events in the last three years and even brought his German shepherd to one of them.

He rejected the idea that his views could be swayed by a certain speaker's agenda or free perks.

"I've been called a liberal judge. I've been called a conservative judge. I've been called a son of a bitch. That comes with the territory," said Starrett. "I pay close attention to speakers that are politically biased one way or another. I listen to them, and I challenge some of them. I ask pointed questions."

Judge Gutierrez, of the Central District of California, has attended three GMU events in the last three years.

"Certainly, I think people have a slant. But for the most part, I found them to be interesting and educational," he said. He added that a group of federal judges will always tend to ask tough questions and get into spirited debates — whether in court or in a legal seminar.

"We want our judges out in the world learning and teaching. And we want our judges to have friendships. We want our judges to be able to travel," said Jefferson, the legal ethics expert at the University of Houston Law Center. "It's the disclosure that matters."

Nick McMillan and Hilary Fung contributed reporting and visuals, with graphic editing by Alyson Hurt.* *This story was edited by Barrie Hardymon with research by Barbara Van Woerkom.

READ MORE:[Expert: Clarence Thomas could face 'criminal prosecution' by not paying taxes on gifts

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Billionaires Are Bankrolling Judges’ Luxury Travel

In 2021 and 2022, two conservative, billionaire-funded legal interests sent more than 100 federal judges on 251 trips to conferences and seminars in cushy locations around the country and overseas, according to a Lever review of hundreds of federal financial disclosure forms.

billionaire-Backed Conservative Legal Groups Are Paying for Judges’ Luxury Vacations

BYANDREW PEREZ

Right-wing legal interests funded by the megawealthy are routinely feting lower-court judges and treating them to all-expenses-paid trips, which effectively function as a reward system for judges who espouse and maintain hard-line conservative legal views.

Guests in the audience during the Federalist Society Executive Branch Review Conference at the Mayflower Hotel, April 25, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

In 2021 and 2022, two conservative, billionaire-funded legal interests sent more than one hundred federal judges on 251 trips to conferences and seminars in cushy locations around the country and overseas, according to a Lever review of hundreds of federal financial disclosure forms.

In all, George Mason University (GMU) and the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers network, funded more than 40 percent of travel-related payments reported by federal judges in those years, far more than any other group.

The staggering number of junkets indicate that, as conservative Supreme Court justices face scrutiny for failing to disclose private luxury travel supplied by billionaire donors, right-wing legal interests funded by the megawealthy are routinely feting lower-court judges and treating them to all-expenses-paid trips to far-flung locales. As with the gifts to Supreme Court justices, the trips effectively function as a reward system for judges who espouse and maintain hard-line conservative legal views.

GMU — a Virginia-based public research university that’s home to the conservative Antonin Scalia Law School and its pro-business, anti-regulation Law and Economics program — paid for federal judges’ transportation, meals, or lodging at least 152 times from 2021–22. The Washington-based Federalist Society covered travel or food-related expenses on at least ninety-nine occasions during the same time period. The judges are not required to disclose how much the excursions cost.

The Federalist Society and GMU are both closely tied to the conservative legal movement and billionaire donors who have a financial interest in how the federal judiciary interprets laws. Both institutions also accept corporate donations.

“The data is really compelling,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a distinguished visiting professor from practice at Georgetown Law. “It confirms what we all knew intuitively: The Federalist Society and George Mason have a deep reach into the federal judiciary, and are using it to ensure that a very particular point of view about legal analysis is conveyed to judges and is done in luxury accommodations, so that judges are much more likely to attend.”

TheLever reviewed electronically available financial disclosure forms filed by more than 1,300 federal judges in 2021 and 2022, and identified at least 595 instances of judges disclosing reimbursements for travel-related expenses.

GMU and the Federalist Society were far and away the top sources of such payments, together accounting for 42 percent of all reimbursements listed by the federal judges. No other organizations came anywhere close to matching their generosity: The third-most common sources on the list — Notre Dame, Georgetown, and George Washington University — accounted for thirteen reimbursements apiece.

The Federalist Society is cochaired by former Donald Trump judicial adviser Leonard Leo, best known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, and the organization receives significant funding from his dark money network. Last year, the Supreme Court that Leo helped build overturned decades of precedent and eliminated federal protections for abortion rights.

Leo, the beneficiary of a historic $1.6 billion dark money donation in 2021, previously brokered a $20 million anonymous gift to rename GMU’s law school after the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. As theLever and ProPublica have reported, that gift to GMU was apparently made by Barre Seid, a little-known Chicago industrialist who converted his electrical surge protector empire into funding for Leo’s unprecedented dark money operation.

GMU has separately received tens of millions in donations from foundations affiliated with the billionaire oil and gas titan Charles Koch, a libertarian activist and longtime opponent of environmental regulations. That included a $10 million contribution in support of renaming the law school. Koch’s foundations have also supported the Federalist Society.

“Right-wing efforts to legislate through our courts — led and bankrolled by conservative kingpin Leonard Leo — have seeped into all levels of the federal judiciary,” said Caroline Ciccone, president of the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US. “It’s no surprise that Leo’s Federalist Society and Scalia Law School are now key hubs for conservative judges to score free luxury trips and unusual perks, undermining judicial integrity and contributing to plummeting public trust in our courts.”

Spokespeople for Leo, Koch’s charitable foundation, GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and the Federalist Society did not respond to theLever’s requests for comment.

“Study Time”

The forty-nine-year-old Law and Economics Center, which promotes a pro-business, anti-regulatory legal perspective, has been housed at GMU since 1986. As the center noted in an event agenda last year, its purpose is to pull together “timely, relevant, and unassailable research on public policy issues” and share it with “those who are directly shaping our country’s public policy discussions.”

“With research divisions devoted to top-quality legal policy analysis and educational outreach to judges, attorneys general, and other policymakers, the [Law and Economics Center] is uniquely equipped to positively affect national policy outcomes,” the center wrote.

A 2022 review of rulings by judges who participated in an early version of this Law and Economics program decades ago by researchers at Columbia University, ETH Zurich, and the Toulouse School of Economics suggests that the core mission of the project has been highly successful.

“Economics-trained judges significantly shift legal outcomes in U.S. courts,” wrote the researchers. “They use economic analysis in their written opinions, render conservative votes and verdicts, rule against regulation, are somewhat more permissive on antitrust, and mete out harsher criminal sentences. When ideas move from economics into law, there are important policy consequences.”

The Law and Economics Center’s judicial educational programs tend to take place at uber-ritzy junkets. Between 2021 and 2022, GMU brought federal judges to destinations including the university’s homebase of Arlington, Virginia; the beaches of Naples and Destin, Florida, and Maui, Hawaii; the mountains of Colorado and Montana; and the United Kingdom and Italy. The program also hosted an event in Leo’s adopted home of Bar Harbor, Maine, right around the time that the Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision.

“Mostly these George Mason things are not held in, you know, Arlington, Virginia,” said Fredrickson, the Georgetown law professor. “They’re held in the Rockies or at Florida resorts, or in some other place where the judge doesn’t have to pay their own way, and it’s pretty nice to get a free ride like that.”

She continued, “If you look at their agendas, they work for an hour or two a day, and then they have ‘study time,’ where in the afternoon, they get to go and ‘study’ — while they also, no doubt, are hitting golf balls. . . . It ends up being a very slanted educational program, it’s the only one that’s going, and it’s awfully nice to hang out on the beach and think about antitrust law.”

Indeed, the agenda for an upcoming, weeklong “Economics Institute for Federal Judges & State Supreme Court Justices,” scheduled to be held in March next year at the Henderson Beach and Spa Resort in Destin, Florida, features ample “study time,” “afternoon breaks,” and free time. Educational programming effectively concludes at 12:15 p.m. each day.

“There’s nobody else who does this,” Fredrickson said of GMU’s Law and Economics program. “They are the ones who got in the business of offering these judicial educational seminars early on, and there’s been nobody with deep pockets who has stepped up to do the same. . . . The major donations that have come in from Barre Seid and from the Koch Brothers into George Mason have enabled them to put on these programs.”

The Federalist Society’s judicial reimbursements don’t sound quite as posh — or so conspicuously like vacations. Generally, the judges are there to give lectures or speak to local lawyers or law students.

Still, the group is constantly shipping judges all over the country. In 2021–22, the Federalist Society reimbursed judges’ travel to Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington state, and Washington, DC.

“The whole thing is really troubling,” said Fredrickson, who previously served as the president of the American Constitution Society (ACS), the much smaller, liberal counterweight to the Federalist Society.

While Fredrickson noted that ACS doesn’t have the budgetary resources for similar events, she said, “I don’t think that organizations like the Federalist Society — or maybe even like ACS, which is definitely less hard-edged than the Federalist Society — [should] be offering these kinds of junkets to judges. It’s not appropriate for the role that they are supposed to play in our judicial system.”

“When Do They Have Time to Be Judges?”

The federal judicial reimbursement data reviewed by theLever shows more than one hundred federal judges accepted paid travel-related expenses from GMU or the Federalist Society between 2021 and 2022.

Some judges stand out for the frequency with which they are traveling on those institutions’ dime — specifically, judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. These judges disclosed receiving at least fifty-four reimbursements provided by the Federalist Society or GMU.

Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, appointed by George W. Bush, listed forty-two reimbursements in 2021 and 2022, more than any other federal judge whose financial disclosure forms were available online. GMU and the Federalist Society accounted for twenty of Sutton’s reimbursements.

Last year, the records show, the National Security Institute at GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School sent Sutton to Padua, Italy, to teach and meet with students, according to his annual disclosure. The Federalist Society sent Sutton to Alabama, Arizona, California, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, DC, to present lectures and participate in conference panels.

Judge Chad Readler, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, listed twenty-four reimbursements, twenty of which were provided by GMU and the Federalist Society.

Judge Amul Thapar, appointed by Trump in 2017, listed 14 reimbursements in 2021. Eight of those travel-related expenses were paid by the Federalist Society. Thapar and Sutton are both known as top “feeder judges”; many of their law clerks go on to work for Supreme Court justices.

Asked about the judges’ travel, Fredrickson joked: “Sounds pretty nice. When do they have time to be judges?”

The Sixth Circuit did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Earlier this year, Sutton issued an opinion striking down a buffer zone law designed to prohibit antiabortion activists from harassing patients and blocking the sidewalk in front of an abortion clinic in Louisville, Kentucky.

This fall, Sutton and Thapar issued a decision allowing Tennessee and Kentucky to enforce laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, meaning that doctors must stop using puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries to treat transgender youths. The ruling acceded to the demands from Tennessee’s Republican attorney general and twenty-one other GOP state attorneys general who filed an amicus brief in the case.

Leo’s dark money network has long been the top financier of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which elects GOP law enforcement chiefs and helps coordinate their efforts to influence policy and shape judicial decisions. The Leo network donated $1 million to the association earlier this year and $6.5 million in the 2022 election cycle, according to data from Political MoneyLine.

The Sixth Circuit case on gender-affirming care could soon come before the Supreme Court and its conservative supermajority, as the families and physician involved in the case have petitioned justices to review the lower court’s decision.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, theLever, here.

https://documented.net/investigations/conservative-partnership-institute

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"America First" Staffing

CPI boasts of recruiting, recommending, and training Congressional staffers who are committed to advancing an America First agenda. In 2021, CPI claims to have 49 members of Congress and 246 Congressional staffers, and to have 200 Congressional staffing recommendations.

“We gave conservatives on Capitol Hill the right skills, the right people, and the right connections—all for the purpose of making America great again,” CPI described in its annual report. For example, in 2021 CPI held “5-week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, where “they armed conservative staffers with every tactic the House and Senate rules gave them: how to force amendment votes, how to work outside the Establishment- dominated committee process, and how to leverage nominations to wage policy fights:”

“You may have seen that conservatives defeated Biden’s gun-grabbing pick to lead the ATF and stopped a communist- sympathizing economist from becoming comptroller of the currency. That didn’t happen by accident.”

According to CPI, “our trainings have become so respected that conservative congressional offices and grassroots advocacy organizations now come to us when they have job openings to fill. They know that we maintain a database of current and prospective congressional staffers who have been through our trainings and are up to the task of putting America first.”

In 2021, CPI purchased a $7.25 million collection of waterfront farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hold Congressional staff retreats and trainings. CPI has since held several all-expenses-paid retreats at the property for Congressional staff. Staffers who attend retreats at the CPI-owned property only disclose receiving an estimated $99/night gift of lodging, which helps obscure reveal the actual benefit received.

CPI-Launched Projects, Many Led by former Trump Officials

....

===

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/08/30/charles-kochs-shape-shifting-influence-machine/

david a

Backed by Trump money and led by insurrectionists under investigation for trying to overturn the 2020 election, the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) has held at least four training sessions for dozens of GOP members of Congress and their staffers so far this year, sometimes paying for their travel and accommodations, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has learned.

The sessions have covered a broad range of topics, from “election integrity” and building an “American First movement” and state “Freedom Caucuses” to trainings on “effective oversight” and “Senate Procedure & Strategy.” Some are led by controversial MAGA leaders, including former Trump chief of staff :{Mark Meadows:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: and Trump attorney :{Cleta Mitchell:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, both of whom have been subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee and the Georgia grand jury investigating attempts to overturn the election results there.

Most of the sessions are held at a previously undisclosed facility :{CPI:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: owns and operates in Cambridge, Maryland, but its :{Winter Leadership Conference:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: was held at the Ritz Carlton’s luxury beach resort on Amelia Island in Florida, documents reviewed by CMD reveal.

The only congresspeople invited to the conference were members of the far-right :{House Freedom Caucus:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, which was chaired by Meadows until he left to serve as Trump’s chief of staff in March 2020. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a 2024 presidential hopeful and a founding member of the Freedom Caucus in 2015, delivered the keynote address.[doc

Opening Remarks: Mark Meadows, Senior Fellow, CPL Ieo& Prayers Rep. Mary Milix Moderator: Rep, Soot Pery Panel Rep. Ralph Norman Rep. Lauren Boehert Rep. Warren Divison 1-125 PM Break 25-290PM Session.#1=CPlUpdate2022Outlook 2021year in review an insight nto upcoming programs and movement efforts Speaker: A Comigan, President& CEO, CPI Mark Meadows, Senor Follow, CPI Wesley Denton, COO, CPT 2g0-g30eM Session £2. Winning Communications Strategy Messagingcurrentconservativepolicygoalsfor2022 andbeyond Moderator: Wesley Denton, C00, CPI Pane Dan Scavino, Former WH DeputyCOS Dir.ofSocial Media lex Waltonis, Compass Media 330600 Break 600-700 PM Reception Fa ager Topic:ConsevatisPole Prioritiesin2022 Remarks: MackMeadows,Senior Partner, CPL Rep. BobGood, Rep. Sot Pry Hau roon Tomli Pasa Ballroom Topic: Biking the AmericanMovement Remarks on wht i takes to bd an AmericaFirst movement Ine:Rachel BovardSpeaker Intro Rep. Lauren Boebert Speaker:Sch Dion, CBO, Babylon Bec Keynote nro: Mark Meadows, SeniorPartner,CPI Keynots: Governor Ron DeSantis Closing: Mark Meadows, Senior Patoer CPI]

Opening Remarks: Mark Meadows, Senior Fellow, CPL Ieo& Prayers Rep. Mary Milix Moderator: Rep, Soot Pery Panel Rep.Ralph Norman Rep. Lauren Boebert Rep. Warren Divison 1-125 PM Break 25-290PM Session.#1=CPlUpdate2022Outlook 2021year in review an insight nto upcoming programs and movement efforts Speaker: A Corrigan, President& CEO, CPI Mark Meadows, Senor Follow, CPI Wesley Denton, COO, CPT 2g0-g30eM Session £2. WinningCommunicationsStrategy Messagingcurrentconservativepolicygoalsfor2022 andbeyond Moderator: Wesley Denton, C00, CPI PaneDan Scavino,Former WH DeputyCOSDir.ofSocial Media lex Waltonis, Compass Media 330600 Break 600-700 PM Reception Fa ager Topic:ConsevatisPolePrioritiesin2022Remarks:MackMeadows,Senior Partner, CPL Rep. BobGood, Rep. Scott PerryHau roon Tomli Pasa Ballroom Topic: BikingtheAmericanMovement Remarks on wht i takes to bd an AmericaFirst movement Ine: Rachel Bovard Speaker Intro Rep. Lauren Bocbert Speaker: Sch Dion, CBO, Babylon Bec Keynote nro: MarkMeadows,SeniorPartner,CPI Keynots: Governor Ron DeSantis Closing: Mark Meadows, Senior Patoer CPI

... Breakfast ‘Remarks on what CPI-incubatedgroupsaredoing oprotect American liberties through the courts, education,andshaping policy 8:20 AM Morning Devotion: JeffTrimbath, M.Div Panel Introduction: Bret Bernhardt, CPI Board Trustee 835AM Moderator: EACorrigan, CEO, CPI Pan: ‘Gene Hamilton, Ameria Fist Legal Foundation “Tom Jones, AmericanAccountability Foundation RussVought, President, Center for Renewing America

‘Sesion3—CPI' Election Integrity Network:WhatWe'veDoneandHowWeAveMaking ‘2022theYear for Fletion Integrity. ‘Heara discussion on whatittakes to ensure honestelections Intro: Ed Corrigan, President & CEO Remarks: Rep. Bob Good, VA Moderator: Cleta Mitchell, Senior Legal Fellow, CPI Panel: Rep. Yvette HerrellLynn Taylor, President, Virginia Institute for Public Policy 1500-12:15 PM Sesion#4 -BuildingStateFreedomCaucuses Lua about CPsupported fort 0 budaeedom Caves in cache eilature nationwide: Moderator; Mark Meadows,SeniorPartner,CPI Speakers: Rep. Andy Biggs ‘Andy Roth, President, SFCN wi15-1:35 PM LunchTopic:CombatingBigTech Censorship How conservatives caneffectivelypushback against big tech censorship 12:30PM Intro & Prayer: Rep. Barry Moore Moderator: Rachel Bovard, Senior Policy Director, CPI Panel: Rep. Dan Bishop Brent Bozell, Founder& President, Media Research Center

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no lnx docs twt

Jim DeMint, a former congressman and senator from South Carolina, founded CPI in 2017 “to be a bulwark against the Swamp and a support system for conservatives looking to do the right thing.”

Its two largest known financial backers are Richard Uihlein,a GOP megadonor and cofounder of Uline shipping and packaging company, and Donald Trump. Uihlein’s family foundation contributed $2.25 million (2018–20) to CPI and Trump’s Save America PACs gave $1 million (2021). The next largest identifiable CPI donor is the family foundation of the late casino mogul Stanley E. Fulton, which contributed $500,000 (2019).

A federal grand jury is investigating the formation of Trump’s Save America PAC and its post-election spending,The New York Times reported last week.

Since the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, CPI has become a hub for insurrectionists and election deniers. The group made Meadows a senior partner and brought in Mitchell to lead its lead its “Election Integrity Network” network, organizing local GOP activists to engage in the election process based on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

So far, Mitchell has led partisan voter suppression and election subversion events in nine states with fellow Big Lie proponents and election fraud conspiracists like Meadows, DeSantis, Mike Gableman, Arizona Senate President and ALEC National Chair Karen Fann (R), and many others with the goal of subverting the electoral system.

CPI has also launched a number of spin-offs to further right-wing causes, including the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), America First Legal, Center for Renewing America, American Cornerstone Institute, American Moment, and the State Freedom Caucus Network.

Staffers Coached in Conservative Oversight

From May 5–6, seven House Republican staffers and three Senate Republican staffers attended an Effective Oversight Training Retreat paid for by AAF and led by CPI, AAF, and the Heritage Foundation—all ostensibly nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organizations.

Attendees participated in six training sessions, according to an agenda obtained by CMD, including on “how to work with legal experts to leverage research and advance conservative priorities in the courts,” “working with outside groups involved in oversight,” and “how to conduct effect research into Presidential appointees and nominees” to “help congressional staff perform proper oversight.”

The latter session was led by AAF’s founder Tom Jones, who is credited with leading GOP opposition to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmationand for sinking the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin for vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, among others.

AAF runs the website bidennoms.com,which currently features opposition campaigns against Phillip Washington for administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); Gigi B. Sohn to be a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Kalpana Kotagal to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); and Dilawar Syed for deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA).

Kotagal appears to be a top target of AAF, prompting it to create the separate website kalpanakotagal.com, where she is labeled a “radical leftist” who is “poised to weaponize the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with an anti-American agenda.”

SCREENSHOT FROM WWW.KALPANAKOTAGAL.COM

Kotagal is actually an accomplished employment and civil rights plaintiffs’ litigator, perhaps best known for co-authoring the “Inclusion Rider,” a contract provision in Hollywood designed to increase diversity in casting and production staff.

In addition to staffers from CPI, AAF, and Heritage, others from the right-wing Capital Research Center, the Republican Study Committee, and Compass Legal also led training sessions. CPI launched Compass Legal to take “care of things like legal filings” and help nonprofits “to comply with federal tax law so they can keep their nonprofit status,” according to its 2021 Annual Report.

Another version of the training agenda obtained by CMD shows that Judicial Watch‘s Tom Fitton was “invited”to discuss the “Oversight Agenda for the 118th Congress.” Fitton is also the 2022 president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive Christian Right group, CMD reported.

Like the organizations involved in the oversight training, CNP is fully aligned with the Republican Party and was deeply tied to the Trump administration and the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Scrutinizing Senate Procedures and Strategy

From June 22–24, staffers and lawyers for GOP Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-S.C.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) attended a Senate Procedure & Strategy Symposium organized and paid for by CPI, according to materials obtained by CMD.

CPI’s president and CEO Ed Corrigan led all but two of the training sessions, an agenda for the event shows. Corrigan served as a Senate staffer for over 10 years and was vice president for policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation before moving to CPI in 2017. Corrigan informed attendees on Senate rules, amendments, and procedures. Brian Darling, president at Liberty Government Affairs, and Kelly Johnston, former secretary of the Senate, also addressed those in attendance.

Staff Assistant Training

On August 10-11, 2022, CPI held a training session for House staffers led by staff at CPI, Heritage Action for America, Center for Renewing America, Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, and current House staffers, an agenda obtained by CMD details.

CPI paid for nine congressional staffers to attend, documents reviewed by CMD show.

Attendees were taught how to be an “effective” staffer, how to write, and “how to optimize the rules to maximize your boss’ effectiveness.”

How to Win the Messaging War

Another CPI spinoff known as the Revere Project has scheduled communication trainings for “Capitol Hill communicators” this month and next, and in January 2023.

The four-week digital communications training in September and October aims to “give participants the strategy and tactics to level up their member’s social media presence.” The January communications training for congressional staffers will cover “crisis comms” and “how to proactively win the messaging war,” among other topics.

Congressional staffers can also schedule a TV Studio Training Bootcamp to learn “best practices” for preparing members of Congress “to visually look good on camera.”

In its 2021 annual review, CPI touts that ittrained “49 members of Congress and 246 congressional staff from 132 congressional offices”last year. This year it appears to be on track to influence several hundred more conservative acolytes.

CPI will hold its annual donor conference next week. “The stage is set. Washington is ready for a conservative comeback,” CPI writes. And “CPI Partners are making it happen.”

below ref to 1993 report:

http://web.archive.org/web/20210506031644/https://www.afj.org/assets/resources/resources2/Justice-for-Sale.pdf

The Workbook, Vol. 18, No. 3 Fall 1993 raticle

Review and Commentary

:{by Richard L. Grossman

Justice For Sale: Shortchanging the Public Interest for Private Gain

Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Justice, 1993

93 pp. $15, paper}:

Justice For Sale describes a "multi-faceted, comprehensive, and integrated campaign" coordinated over the past 20 years by large corporations and "ideologically-compatible foundations" to create tax-payer subsidized law firms, to change the civil justice system, to shape law school curriculum, to organize and reward law students, to affect the minds and decisions of sitting judges.

The goal of this "relatively quite but significant effort" was "to rewrite American jurisprudence. . . advanc[e] their agenda before judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and government policy makers. In addition, by focussing extensively on law schools and the next generation of lawyers, they have sought to assure control over the future direction of the law."

In 1971, Virginia attorney (later Supreme Court Justice) Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the United States Chamber of Commerce. As Justice For Sale describes it, Powell warned against zealous environmentalists, consumer activists and others who "propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it." It was time, Powell said, "for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it."

A successful corporate counterattack, in Powell's view, would require broad-based and coordinated activism on campuses, in the media, in political arenas and -- most importantly -- in the courts: "Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change," Powell wrote.

Among Powell's recommendations, Justice For Sale notes, was to establish a business-sponsored legal center that would promote business interests and not hesitate to "attack the Naders" and others who "seek destruction of the system."

Soon the California Chamber of Commerce would propose what would become in 1973 the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit set up in Sacramento, California, from seed money raised by J. Simon Fluor of the Fluor Corporation. And in 1975, the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI) was formed "to assist in the establishment of independent regional litigation foundations dedicated to a balanced view of the role of law in achieving economic and social progress."

NLCPI helped create seven more such firms around the country, six of which operate today with money from the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and Smith Richardson Foundations. In courts around the nation, they are challenging Superfund/hazardous waste programs, environmental regulations. and rent control statutes -- all of which they regard as grave challenges to economic freedom. They are also designing litigation around "takings" -- the doctrine that some government regulations constitute takings of private property without due process and just compensation, thereby violating the Fifth Amendment. With this tactic, they are seeking not merely to invalidate specific laws or to argue interpretations of laws. Rather, they are seeking to eradicate categories of laws by changing prevailing legal theory and establishing new precedents.

These legal foundations claim they are expanding the property rights and resource access rights of persons. But because the corporation under law is considered to be a person, with every victory they actually expand the property and resource access rights of corporations.

Olin Foundation president William Simon, a former Treasury Secretary, has been a major player in these efforts. He is quoted in Justice For Sale: "Funds generated by business . . . must rush by multimillions to the aid of liberty . . . to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty."

Simon and many others have orchestrated and coordinated "sophisticated media offensives, academic research, and advocacy efforts" with lavish funding from Aetna Life And Casualty Corporation, Exxon Corporation, Pfizer Corporation, RJR Nabisco Corporation, General Electric Corporation, Dow Corporation, Monsanto Corporation and other legal fictions chartered in our names in our several states.

Corporate money has also been rushed by multimillions to corporate fronts such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Insurance Information Institute, the Product Liability Coordinating Committee, and the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA). (The ATRA is made up of corporation trade groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association -- thus giving corporations a decoy and accomplice group two full steps removed from their board rooms.) Judge Robert Bork, Irving Kristol, and law schools at Stanford, Yale, Columbia, George Mason, Chicago and Virginia universities have also been beneficiaries of this corporate largess.

Corporate money created the Federalist Society in 1982, helping it to gather 10,000 members at 120 law schools. "Dedicated to purging law schools and the legal system of the `orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society,'" declares Justice For Sale,

the Society is now the principal organization for recruiting, educating and mobilizing conservative students on law school campuses and showcasing conservative legal scholarship. . . . The group's influence is perhaps best exemplified by the success of its three co-founders. As a member of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, Lee Liberman was considered the "ideological gatekeeper for the Bush Administration's process for selecting judges." David McIntosh served as Executive Director of Vice President Quayle's Council on Competitiveness, and Steven Calabresi, now a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, was a special assistant to Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese.

In sum, paying for and orchestrating law and economics professors and curricula at the nation's elite schools, sponsoring conferences, Continuing Legal Education workshops, legal research and theoretical writing, as well as for massive advertising and strategic litigation, these corporation initiatives "to make conservative economic theory the cornerstone of legal decision making," documents Justice For Sale, have set up an "institutional network that will advance and sustain their cause well into the future. Integrated and intergenerational, this infrastructure includes representatives from all segments of the legal establishment -- judges, scholars, practitioners, and young apprentices hailing from the Federalist Society."

Justice For Sale is a frightening report, meticulously documented with references to the professors, theorists, and foundations behind this campaign. "Intended to provoke debate" and "instigate true reform of the legal system," it should be a catalyst for public debate and strategizing. Read it.

Readers, however, should consider this report in a broader political and historical context than the one the Alliance establishes for its hue and cry.

For example, as former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out decades ago, the history of constitutional law is "the history of the impact of the modern corporation upon the American scene." But Justice For Sale interprets current corporate efforts as seeking "to shift the law from its traditional foundations of public justice and equity . . . to elevate corporate profits and private wealth over social justice and individual rights as the cornerstones of our legal process." Alas, such shifts and elevations were engineered by the forbears of today's corporations over a century ago and steadily extended ever since.

Justice For Sale also posits as our public policy choices only government regulation, on the one hand, and unregulated markets on the other. It makes no mention of alternatives to private corporations -- public ownership of enterprises, cooperatives or worker- and municipally- owned businesses -- well within American traditions.

The report does not discuss how corporations shaped and dominated the operations of (to cite only a few) the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Employment Act of 1946, the Taft-Hartley Act, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Atomic Energy/Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the latest Clean Air Act Amendments. We must therefore inquire, after Morton J. Horwitz (The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 [1977]): what evidence is there for this report "characterizing most forms of government activity as a promotion of the public interest?"

Lastly, this report stops far short of where its own internal logic clearly points: the need for major, coordinated, well-funded citizen counter strategies directed at the public, law schools and the courts, and for strategies that challenge the legitimacy and existence of today's corporations.

From a strategic perspective, it is vital to understand that Justice Powell wasn't just whistling Dixie when he counseled the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 that "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change." As Professor Horwitz has observed in his book on legal history from the ratification of the Constitution to the Civil War:

A major transformation of the legal system took place . . . it enabled emergent entrepreneurial and commercial groups to win a disproportionate share of wealth and power in American society. . . . [T]he law had come simply to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produced. . . . [T]he American judiciary -- especially aggressively procommercial [and not-elected -- RG] federal judges -- managed to overthrow earlier economic commercial legal rules. . . . [A]s political and economic power shifted to merchant and entrepreneurial groups . . . they began to forge an alliance with the legal profession to advance their own interests through a transformation of the legal system . . . to create legal doctrines that simply mirrored the market.

Despite such accomplishments, the judiciary did not rest from its labors. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, appointed judges gave privilege after privilege to corporations. They invented new doctrines such as freedom of contract, substantive due process and managerial prerogative, which they used to overturn state laws asserting even limited citizen sovereignty over corporations, and to bestow upon corporations constitutional authority over investment, production, and the organization of work.

According to Professor Martin J. Sklar, by establishing "new trends in legal doctrine and political-economic theory" allowing "the corporate reorganization of the property-production system," the Supreme Court helped to sabotage blossoming social protest movements against corporate power and corporate harms. [See The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, The Law and Politics (Cambridge University Press 1988).]

So the law had already been stacked on behalf of corporations when attorney Lewis Powell penned his memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 and when former Treasury Secretary William Simon started soliciting corporate millions. Justice For Sale describes what is only the latest in a long history of corporate efforts to use judges and the law to shape legal doctrines governing investment, production, natural resources, the rights of workers, the rights of stockholders, the liabilities of corporations and their executives. Simon's initiative is but another corporate campaign to limit citizens' constitutional rights, to close off the courts as a means of redress against concentrations of capital.

By virtue of their claimed right to influence the electoral process (upheld by the courts under the doctrine of "commercial free speech"), corporations have been major opponents of citizen referenda and initiatives to stop corporate harms, and major proponents of referenda and initiatives to shape government intervention in the economy. Via contributions to House and Senate candidates, they have bought the best Congress money can buy. Via campaign contributions to state legislators and with help from the American Bar Association and state bar associations, they have been rewriting corporation, tort, contract, property and liability laws. Never known for thinking small, they are today unabashedly writing such laws for former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries -- places where these same corporations are seeking natural resources, cheap labor and vast markets.

Justice For Sale has correctly identified a major strategy of large and powerful corporations to undermine citizen efforts to protect worker rights, community rights, constitutional rights, biological diversity, and the earth itself. But if we intend to "instigate true reform of the legal system and a return to a process that seeks to secure justice for all," we must go well beyond this report's recommendations.

Three hundred years ago, the corporation was understood to be a convenience devised by monarchs. merchants, explorers and men of wealth. It was a legal device to gather up resources and hold property, to exploit and dominate people. After the American Revolution, it was generally understood that the people were -- and desired to remain -- sovereign over corporations. Accordingly, Americans limited corporate existence to a set number of years and spelled out rules each corporation had to follow.

Today, the 15 largest global corporations have gross incomes greater than the gross domestic products of over 120 countries.

The 100 largest global corporations have incomes greater than half the member nations of the United Nations.

The havoc such corporations cause -- documented in every issue of The Workbook, combined with the research reported in Justice For Sale -- make clear that people must again extend our inquiries, political debates and active citizenship beyond "government regulation," on the one hand, and "the free market" on the other.

We can challenge the legitimacy -- and the existence -- of large corporations doing harm. As Paul Hawken, a founder of Smith and Hawken Corporation, recently offered as a first step toward a sustainable world economy [Utne Reader, Sept/ Oct 1993]:

Take Back The Charter. . . . Although corporate charters may seem to have little to do with sustainability, they are critical to any long-term movement toward restoration of the planet. . . . Corporations are chartered by, and exist at the behest of, citizens. Incorporation is not a right but a privilege granted by the state that includes certain considerations such as limited liability. Corporations are supposed to be under our ultimate authority, not the other way around. The charter of incorporation is a revocable dispensation that was supposed to ensure accountability of the corporation to the society as a whole. . . . We should remember that citizens of this country originally envisioned corporations to be part of a public-private partnership, which is why the relationship between the chartering authority of state legislatures and the corporation was kept alive and active. They had it right.

Justice For Sale concludes by reiterating that the direction in which the legal system is moving and the corporate forces propelling it raise "troubling and provocative concerns." In order to protect academic freedom, as well as our system of justice, the book's authors maintain, there must be "informed debate within law schools" and "full disclosure." Further, legislators, judges, and juries must "apply exacting scrutiny to the message and messengers of the so-called `civil justice reform' movement," and any "fine-tuning" of the civil justice system must depend on "accurate. relevant data." Finally,

the litigation strategy pursued by the business-funded public interest law firms,' complemented by the scholarship flowing from law schools and think tanks . . . mandate a corresponding vigilance of their actions in the courts, in judicial seminars,' in the law schools and in the legislatures.

Troubling and provocative concerns? Full disclosure and informed debate? Exacting scrutiny? Fine-tuning? Accurate, relevant data? Corresponding vigilance? Well, yes, of course.

But fantastically wealthy and powerful corporations have a 20-year head start on expanding the legal rights and powers they usurped over the previous 150 years. So we the people need ambitious, well-planned, coordinated, public counter strategies in each of the realms the report details, plus the real money to extend and expand these strategies over several decades.

We need law professors, law students, tacticians and organizers, unions and environmental groups, civil rights and consumer groups, garden clubs, students and enlightened business people, plus the growing locally based movement for environmental and economic justice here and around the world, to organize an array of coordinated short- and long- term efforts.

The Alliance For Justice and other organizations should convene meetings to plan for more than fine-tuning the law, for more than restoring the legal system to what it was in 1970. Starting with denying the corporation personhood under the Constitution and reformulating managerial prerogative and liability, we need to reverse the transformation of the law that corporations accomplished over a century ago.

These counter-strategies also need to redesign the corporations -- which throughout U.S. history have been rewriting the rules of their own existence -- to redefine in fundamental ways those legal fictions that Thomas Hobbes labeled, "worms in the body politic."

[Order Justice for Sale from Alliance For Justice, 1601 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20009.]

Richard L. Grossman was director of Environmentalists for Full Employment from 1976-1984. He, is the co-author, with Frank T. Adams, of the recent pamphlet, Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation, which may be ordered for $4, plus 52 postage (bulk rates available), from Charter Ink./CSPP, P.O. Box 806, Cambridge, MA 02140.

http://web.archive.org/web/20190305232930/https://publicintegrity.org/federal-politics/corporations-pro-business-nonprofits-foot-bill-for-judicial-seminars/

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JUSTICE OBSCURED

Published — March 28, 2013

Updated — May 27, 2014

CORPORATIONS, PRO-BUSINESS NONPROFITS FOOT BILL FOR JUDICIAL SEMINARS

conservative foundations, multinational oil companies and a prescription drug maker were the most frequent sponsors of more than 100 expense-paid educational seminars attended by federal judges over a 4 1/2-year period, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

Among the seminar titles were “TheMoral Foundations of Capitalism,” “Corporations and the Limits of Criminal Law” and “Terrorism, Climate & Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty & the Rule of Law.”

Leading the list of sponsors of the 109 seminars identified by the Center were the conservative Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, The Searle Freedom Trust, also a supporter of conservative causes, ExxonMobil Corp., Shell Oil Co., pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and State Farm Insurance Cos. Each were sponsors of 54 seminars.

Other top sponsors included the conservative Lynde and HarryBradley Foundation (51), Dow Chemical Co. (47), AT&T Inc. (45) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (46), according to the Center’s analysis.

Sponsors pick up the cost of judges’ expenses, which often include air fare, hotel stays and meals. The seminars in the Center’s investigation took place from July 2008 through 2012.

The Center identified 185 federal district and appeals court judges who reported attending one or more of the seminars over the period, according to disclosure forms, or about 11 percent of the more than 1,700 federal judges in the United States.

Two schools — George Mason University, located in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., and Northwestern University based in Evanston, Ill., — hosted more than two-thirds of the seminars....

https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/venue-of-last-resort/

no lnx many

VENUE OF LAST RESORT [pun?]

Wave of climate lawsuits threatens the future of Big Oil

Fossil-fuel interests are working to seed the courts, long viewed as apolitical

Illustration by Robert Fresson

by Jie Jenny Zou, Chris Young

December 12, 2017

In early October, 22 state and federal judges hailing from Honolulu to Albany got a crash course in scientific literacy and economics.The three-day symposium was billed as a way to help the judges better scrutinize evidence used to defend government regulations.

But the all-expenses-paid event hosted by George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center in Arlington, Virginia, served another purpose: It was the first of several seminars designed to promote “skepticism” of scientific evidence among likely candidates for the 140-plus federal judgeships President Trump will fill over the next four years.

Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr.

Robert Fresson

Read more about how air quality is the new frontier for climate-change skeptics long tied to API »

The lone science instructor was Louis Anthony Cox Jr., a risk analyst with deep industry ties whose recent appointment as chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee drew condemnation in public-health circles. Since 1988, Cox has consulted for the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group that spent millions to dispute the cancer-causing properties of benzene, an ingredient in gasoline, and is now working to discredit the science on smog-causing ozone. He’s also testified on behalf of the chemical industry and done research for tobacco giant Philip Morris.

For a $4,000 honorarium, Cox delivered two closed-door lectures at George Mason: “a primer on the scientific method,” followed by a session aimed at “understanding what science can and cannot do.” Included in his presentation were slides urging judges to be wary of EPA science on fine particles — a pollutant he has been researching for API.

The symposium included a “mandatory” dinner at Capitol Hill’s upscale Charlie Palmer Steak, whose website says it “moves the political power meetings out of the back room and into private dining spaces.” Events such as the symposium are one way Big Oil is trying to impart free-market values to judges and attorneys general as the industry gears up for legal battles on multiple fronts.

Based in George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School,the Law & Economics Center espouses a free-market approach to policy. A 2013 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that the libertarian think tank hosted more judicial conferences than any other university program in the nation, fueled by conservative and big-business donors. Over the past two years, roughly $4.5 million of $18.6 million in contributions to the Law & Economics Center came from oil and gas interests, including Koch Industries, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and API, which represents more than 650 corporations.

The center claims to have trained more than 5,000 state and federal judges, including three sitting Supreme Court justices. Almost 1,000 state attorneys general and their staff attorneys have attended its programs. Its advisory board includes three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, widely considered the nation’s second-most powerful court and, often, the final arbiter for federal administrative law cases.

In a White House riven by discord and staff departures, judicial appointments have been a bright spot. Senate Republicans have embraced the chance to fill a glut of vacancies, helping Trump install more conservative judges and potentially transform the legal landscape for decades to come. Once confirmed, a federal judge can serve for life, presiding over an average of 500 to 600 cases a year.

A Washington trade group with 300-plus employees, APIhas spent more than $40 million to lobby Congress since 2013. But the courts have also been a focal point for API, which has spent the better part of a century helping the oil and gas industry pivot from being a prime antitrust target to being a proactive litigation force. The institute, along with other free-market trade groups, has routinely injected itself into cases in an attempt to shape policy or stall government initiatives. API officials did not grant interview requests from the Center for Public Integrity.

“Time is on industry’s side.”

With a new era of environmental deregulation under way, issues ranging from the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to offshore drilling in the Arctic are landing in the courts for final say. The stakes are enormous for the industry, which is simultaneously confronting a wave of lawsuits that seek billions of dollars in damages for climate-change impacts. Among the defendants areAPI members such as ExxonMobil.

Unlike government and the public, industry can afford to wait. “In many of these matters, litigation goes on decades and decades,” said Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Time is on industry’s side.”

American Petroleum Institute, et al.

Time has worked to API’s advantage. The institute was founded in 1919 amid congressional demands to nationalize the oil industry during World War I, forcing competing companies to band together for survival. In the near-century since, API has helped thwart regulations by tying them up in court.

An exterior shot of the Lenexa Federal Records Center, an annex of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Center for Land Use Interpretation (licensed CC NC-SA)

Archives at the Lenexa Federal Records Center are located 60 feet below ground in limestone caves.

NARA

Buried in limestone caves 60 feet below Lenexa, Kansas, is an esoteric slice of API history. Yellowing records at the National Archives annex there are all that remain of a 1940 lawsuit so expansive that three pages of the complaint simply list defendants — all 379 of them.

United States of America v. American Petroleum Institute, et al. alleged widescale collusion and price-fixing by 22 major oil companies and their 300-plus affiliates, which controlled a total of $9 billion in assets (the equivalent of $160 billion today). The U.S. Department of Justice charged that the industry was unlawfully consolidating — with the institute’s help — and vowed to take the antitrust case all the way to the Supreme Court.

“The industry is dominated and controlled by the 22 defendant majors who transact more than 85 percent of the total business of the industry,” the Justice Department wrote in its complaint. “Where normal competition once flourished, the rapid development of the completely integrated defendants has substantially destroyed competition.”

Read more about Big Oil's unlikely alliance with the White House ]

American Petroleum Institute, et al. never made it to trial.The case was neutered early on by 11 oil executives working closely with the White House to ensure an Allied victory in World War II. The executives — nine of whom were affiliated with defendant companies — asked the attorney general to strike from the complaint a provision that would have forced companies to divest assets such as pipelines. This, the men warned, could hamper the war effort and “becloud relationships between the government and industry.”

After languishing in the courts for years, the lawsuit was dismissed in 1951 by the Justice Department, which found it to be a logistical nightmare. Gone, too, was the government’s interest in dissolving API as a monopolistic tool of industry. This year, API wriggled out of public scrutiny once more. In yet another potentially landmark case, lawyers suing the U.S. government for inaction on climate change tried to compel the institute to turn over decades of internal records. API had joined the case to help defend the government but dropped out rather than reveal what it knew about global warming, and when.

“They're a highly sophisticated, integrated political operation,” said Bob Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University. API’s effectiveness, Brulle said, lies in its partnerships with like-minded groups such as the American Chemistry Council, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — amplifying its message “in a very directed, coordinated way.” In 2016, the institute absorbed its only real competitor, America’s Natural Gas Alliance.

With ample resources at their disposal, groups such as API — which employs a full-time legal staff and can also tap into the legal teams of its member companies — can quickly blunt federal regulatory efforts or simply wait for the political winds to change.

On November 30, 1999, for example, representatives of more than 20 lobby groups met at the institute’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to muster opposition to an EPA plan to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Leading the meeting was API lobbyist Phil Cooney. In a memo, the institute offered to coordinate on the alliance’s behalf, pushing out the message to politicians and the news media. But by 2001, the political climate had changed. Cooney had become head of environmental policy for George W. Bush’s White House, where he altered federal reports to sow doubt on climate change. Under Bush, the EPA retreated from its earlier position, claiming it didn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases after all. Cooney could not be located for comment.

The issue came to a head in 2003 when 12 states sued the EPA to force its hand. Coming to the agency’s defense was the CO2 Litigation Group, a newly formed coalition of 14 trade associations — including API. The coalition represented a spectrum of fossil-fuel companies, which argued that the EPA had “oversimplified” and overstated the certainty of climate change’s effects.

The case, Massachusetts v. EPA, was decided in the states’ favor by the Supreme Court in 2007. But the matter continued to be tied up in the courts and the EPA bureaucracy, and it wasn’t until 2011 that the agency finally began regulating greenhouse gases. This gave rise to Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which targeted carbon dioxide emissions and became mired in litigation before the Trump administration marked it for extinction.

‘Irreparably harmed’

The back-and-forth of politics can be dispiriting. For that reason, James Hansen has staked his family's future — and the planet’s — on the courts. His granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is one of 21 child and teenage plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States, a 2015 lawsuit that faults the government for failing to address climate change over half a century.

Dr. James Hansen, Columbia University

YouTube

Sophie Kivlehan, granddaughter of James Hansen

YouTube

“What we want is a plan — just for the government to have a plan,” said Hansen, a former NASA scientist who now directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is acting as a scientific expert in the case. Last year, industry groups including API became parties to the case.

It was Hansen’s congressional testimony as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the sweltering summer of 1988 that elevated global warming from simmering concern to boiling reality. With “99-percent” certainty, Hansen explained that the trend was a side effect of fossil-fuel combustion that would worsen without swift action. Months later, a group that would come to include 170 scientists from 25 countries united to confront what it called “the greatest global environmental challenge facing mankind.”

When Hansen returned to Capitol Hill in 1989, he found his testimony heavily edited by the White House Office of Management and Budget under President George H.W. Bush. The office softened his conclusions, tacked on a paragraph qualifying his findings and otherwise stirred uncertainty about man-made causes of climate change.

While many have focused on what, and when, companies such as ExxonMobil knew about climate change, Julia Olson — a lawyer with Our Children’s Trust, a legal aid group representing the Juliana plaintiffs — is making a case for government complicity.

After years of litigating environmental cases, Olson realized she was dealing with symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself. “We were just playing a game of Whac-a-mole. One new part of our fossil fuel energy system would pop up, and we’d challenge it, and then it’d pop up somewhere else.”

She turned her attention to the government, which “chooses the winners and losers” and has long abetted fossil fuels, she said, allowing the industry to drill, mine and build. “Everyone wants Exxon to be the enemy,” Olson said, but, “every administration has made that decision to perpetuate fossil fuels.”

After digging through presidential archives, her researchers found what they believe is the earliest White House reference to climate change: a 1961 letter from Sen. Clinton Anderson of New Mexico to President John F. Kennedy, recounting a meeting a day earlier at which they discussed a Fortune article warning of sea-level rise from a warming climate.

Lyndon B. Johnson was the first president to publicly acknowledge such warming. In a speech in January 1965, he described how “a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels” was permanently altering the planet. By year’s end, his science advisory board had delivered a detailed report on the “invisible pollutant” capable of melting ice caps and raising sea levels.

Despite these early warnings, little has been done, Olson said. Since Hansen’s 1988 testimony, there have been more excessively hot years than at any other time on record. Two international accords tackling climate change have been brokered, with the United States conspicuously absent on both.

Though not named in Juliana, API , the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers quickly intervened in the lawsuit,asserting their right to protect their members’ economic interests. The move awkwardly put the fossil-fuel groups on the same side as the Obama administration.

Their involvement in Juliana was short-lived. In late February, plaintiffs filed a detailed 21-page discovery request for API alone, seeking decades of internal communications, policies and reports related to climate change. By late June, all three trade groups had exited a case they had voluntarily joined. A judge allowed them to drop out after they were unable to agree on the causes and effects of greenhouse gases. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., suspects the groups “fled to avoid having to make the disclosures.” A vocal supporter of the Juliana action, Whitehouse believes the courts will hold industry accountable. “You have a judge and you have sanctions for not telling the truth, and that is a combination that for decades the fossil fuel industry has sought to avoid like Kryptonite."

Other climate-related lawsuits have followed Juliana, which is set for trial in 2018. Last summer, three California coastal communities filed suit against 37 fossil-fuel companies, blaming their greenhouse-gas emissions for rising sea levels. In September, San Francisco and Oakland became the first major U.S. cities to sue oil companies to cover past and future flood damage. In November, a Pennsylvania lawsuit alleged that the Trump administration is using “junk science” to roll back climate policies. A lawsuit pitting Portuguese schoolchildren against 47 European nations for failing to act on climate is in the works.

George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center is located in this Arlington, Va., building.

Ron Cogswell (licensed CC BY)

‘Unwarranted and exaggerated’

WhenGregory Conkobegan organizing the October judges’ symposium at George Mason University, he wanted to ensure that participants left knowing science’s limitations. “Even good science cannot always answer the questions regulatory agencies ask,” he wrote to Louis “Tony” Cox, the risk analyst, in a May email obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a records request. “Even the best science is not capable of yielding normative judgments about whether something is necessarily good or bad, safe or dangerous, etc."

Conko headed the Competitive Enterprise Institute — a libertarian think tank known for fostering climate-change denial — before joining Mason’s Law & Economics Center last winter. Before Conko settled on Cox to lead the seminar, Nancy Beck, a former policy director for the American Chemistry Council who is now the EPA’s top official on toxic chemicals, was a candidate, emails show. So was Michael Gough, a toxicologistwith ties to the tobacco industry and oil-backed climate-change denial groups. Conko declined requests for an interview.

“Even good science cannot always answer the questions regulatory agencies ask.”

Like Beck and Gough, Cox has championed narratives amenable to industry’s bottom line but not supported by mainstream science. In 2015, Cox said that “no detectable public health benefits” would result from a stricter EPA ozone limit. His testimony was cited in an op-ed by API President Jack Gerard, who ended the column with a warning: “Economic recovery is far from complete, and saddling the nation’s job creators with burdensome new restrictions threatens to deal another blow to the middle-class economy.”

What Gerard didn’t mention was Cox’s history with the institute, which spans decades. At the time the column was published, Cox was receiving funding from both the institute and the American Chemistry Council, which also represents petrochemical companies.

In an interview, Cox denied that industry funding influences his findings. He criticized EPA science as flawed, saying it assumes links that haven’t been proven.

“I see a tremendous lack of clarity when agencies say there’s reason to believe X causes Y,” Cox said. “The proposition that the science is settled — ‘We don’t need to look at this’ — it’s a bad proposition.”

Cox holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science and a master’s degree in operations research, which focuses on decision-making — both from MIT.

Asked about his involvement in the George Mason symposium, Cox said that “judges in particular should have a healthy skepticism, especially about claims of causality.”

Fellow risk analyst and friend Adam Finkel counts Cox among an elite few who have the credentials for risk analysis, an amalgam of health sciences, economics, policy-making and statistics. But their views on what should or shouldn’t be regulated couldn’t be further apart.

A former director of health standards programs at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Finkel has spent his career trying to strengthen worker protections against toxic substances. “It’s disappointing to me that someone as smart as he is can make such a stupid mistake,” Finkel, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan, said of Cox. “I don’t ascribe evil intent to him; he’s just lost his way.”

The weight of evidence, Finkel said, isn’t on Cox’s side. “He’s not just saying, ‘We should wait for the right answer.’ He’s saying, ‘We should be more protective of the economy than of human health.’”

The Law & Economics Center was founded in 1974 at the University of Miami School of Law by Henry G. Manne, Dean Emeritus of the George Mason University School of Law.

At its inception, the LEC was focused on the academic world offering regular conferences for scholars, both in law and in economics and publishing a newsletter reporting all academic developments in the law and economics field. In 1976, it began offering programs for federal judges.

The LEC remained at Miami for six years before moving to Emory University in 1980. In 1986, it moved once again, this time to its current home, the George Mason University School of Law, where it became an integrated part of the law school. Here, for a time, the federal judicial component became the exclusive focus of the LEC.

In July of 2010, under the leadership of its new Executive Director, Henry N. Butler, the LEC was revitalized. Today, it not only offers its now well known programs for federal judges, but it has successfully expanded its offerings to once again include robust programs for the academic community as well as for new groups of policymakers, which includestate judges, state attorneys general and their senior staff attorneys and Congressional staff.

In the LEC’s 37^th year, academic year 2010-2011, the LEC it grew from an organization with an annual budget of $1.2 million offering eight residential judicial programs for approximately 200 judges per year to one that raised over $5 million and offered 42 programs attended by 445 judges, 146 attorneys general and attorneys general senior staff, 154 scholars representing 79 academic institutions, and 137 other policymakers in that year alone.

During the 2011-2012 academic year, the LEC offered 39 programs with an attendance of over 1800 participants.

In 2012-2013, the LEC ran 48 programs totaling 151 program days, commissioned 24 academic papers, completed 4 research projects, and initiated 4 new research projects. In the process, it brought together 382 academics, 289 judges, 9 attorneys general, 215 attorneys general staff members, and 267 congressional staff members. The LEC did this with a team of 14 and a budget of $6.5 million. The LEC has 47 programs scheduled for the 2013-2014 academic year.

OMG JANE M CHE

By 1986, Bruce Ackerman, then a professor at Columbia Law School, called Law and Economics "the most important thing in legal education since the birth of Harvard Law School." Teles, in his 2008 book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, described Law and Economics as "the most successful intellectual movement in the law of the past 30 years, having rapidly moved from insurgency to hegemony."

As Law and Economics spread, underwritten at each step by the Olin foundation and other conservative backers including the Kochs and Scaife, liberal critics grew alarmed.The Alliance for Justice, a liberal nonprofit in Washington, published a critical report in 1993 warning that "a small wealthy group" was trying to "fundamentally alter the way that justice is dispensed in our society." It revealed that the Olin foundation was paying students thousands of dollars to take classes in Law and Economics at Georgetown Law School and to attend workshops on the subject at Columbia Law School.

Despite this ethically dubious situation, only one law school, at the University of California at Los Angeles, turned the Olin funds away, arguing that by plying students with grant money, the foundation was "taking advantage of students' financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology."

More controversial still were Law and Economics seminars that the Olin foundation funded for judges. The seminars were initiated by Henry Manne, who had become dean of the George Mason University School of Law, which he was trying to transform into a hub of libertarian jurisprudence. The seminars treated judges to two-week-long, all-expenses-paid immersion training in Law and Economics, usually in luxurious settings like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla.

They soon became popular free vacations for the judges, a cross between Maoist cultural re-education camps and Club Med. After a few hours of learning why environmental and labor laws were anathema, or why, as Manne argued, insider-trading laws did more harm than good, the judges broke for golf, swimming, and delightful dinners with their hosts. Within a few years, 660 judges had gone on these junkets, some, like the U.S. Court of Appeals judge and unconfirmed Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, many times. By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary had participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas.

A variety of major corporations eagerly joined Olin and other conservative foundations in footing the bills. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that between 2008 and 2012 close to 185 federal judges attended judicial seminars sponsored by conservative interests, several of which had cases before the courts. The lead underwriters were the Charles Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and State Farm, the insurance company. Topics ranged from "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism" to "Terrorism, Climate, and Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty and the Rule of Law."

Simultaneously, the Olin foundation provided crucial start-up funds for the Federalist Society, an organization for conservative law students founded in 1982. With $5.5 million from the Olin foundation, as well as large donations from foundations tied to Scaife, the Kochs, and other conservative legacies, the Federalist Society grew from a pipe dream shared by three ragtag law students into a powerful professional network of 42,000 right-leaning lawyers, with 150 law-school campus chapters and about 75 lawyers' groups nationally. All of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are members, as are former vice president Dick Cheney, the former attorneys general Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, and numerous members of the federal bench. Its president, Eugene B. Meyer, son of a founding editor of National Review, acknowledged that without Olin funding "it possibly wouldn't exist at all." Looking back, the Olin foundation's staff described it as "one of the best investments" the foundation ever made.

The Olin foundation also backed what came to be known as the Collegiate Network, privately financing a string of right-wing newspapers on America's college campuses. Among them was The Dartmouth Review, which infamously published an editorial in Ebonics proclaiming, "Now we be cornin' to Dartmut' and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin' Phi Beta Kappa."...

Pro-business organizations sponsor expense-paid seminars for federal judges

By Chris Young, Reity O'Brien and Andrea Fuller, Center for Public Integrity March 28, 20132:33pm

Conservative foundations, multinational oil companies and a prescription drug maker were the most frequent sponsors of more than100 expense-paid educational seminars attended by federal judges over a 4 1/2-year period,according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

Among the seminar titles were “TheMoral Foundations of Capitalism,” “Corporations and the Limits of Criminal Law” and “Terrorism, Climate & Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty & the Rule of Law.”

Other top sponsors included the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (51), Dow Chemical Co. (47), AT&T Inc. (45) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (46), according to the Center’s analysis.

Critics complain that many of the privately funded conferences serve state and federal judges a steady dose of free-market, anti-regulation lectures that could influence judges’ rulings from the bench.

Sponsors pick up the cost of judges’ expenses, which often include air fare, hotel stays and meals. The seminars in the Center’s investigation took place from July 2008 through 2012.

Among the participants: U.S. District Judge Carl J. Barbier of the Eastern District of Louisiana. One of the two seminars he attended in 2009,“Criminalization of Corporate Conduct," was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and other business interests. Barbier is now presiding over the BP oil spill trial.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Jerry A. Brown, who serves in the Eastern District of Louisiana, also attended two seminars: “Economics Institute for Judges” in 2009 and “Antitrust Law and Economics Institute for Judges” in 2012.

Two schools — George Mason University, located in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., and Northwestern University based in Evanston, Ill., — hosted more than two-thirds of the seminars.

Roughly three-fourths of the more than 800 sponsors listed in documents were individuals, including a number of judges who took trips, raising the possibility that they may have offset the cost of the sponsorships with their donations. Most of the remaining underwriters were companies and foundations.

Determining exactly how much was paid by which sponsor is difficult to determine — amounts are not required to be reported under the disclosure rules.

Judicial conferences are billed as educational retreats intended to improve judges’ understanding of the law and economics. Judges and seminar hosts say the conferences, which feature lectures and panel discussions, provide helpful information that refines their legal expertise.

But they've long drawn scrutiny for how they are funded and organized.

Since the 1990s, critics have complained that many of the privately funded conferences serve state and federal judges a steady dose of free-market, anti-regulation lectures that could influence judges, rulings from the bench.

Those concerns quieted in 2007, when the Judicial Conference of the United States, a group of senior circuit judges who oversee the U.S. Courts, implemented a policy requiring judges and seminar hosts to disclose information about the conferences.

Well-traveled jurists

The most-traveled judges, according to reports filed online by the judges, were U.S. District Judge Charles R. Wolle of the Southern District of Iowa and Chief Judge Thomas B. Bennett of the Northern District of Alabama Bankruptcy Court. Each reported attending nine seminars.

Wolle is a “senior status” judge, meaning he is semi-retired. He did not respond to requests for comment.

The next-most-traveled judges were:

U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real of the Central District of California and Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals 9th Circuit, covering the Western states, who each took eight trips;
E. Grady Jolly, a federal appeals court judge for the 5th Circuit which includes Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael B. Kaplan of the District of New Jersey, who each took six trips;
U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt of the Southern District of Texas, Chief Magistrate Judge Thomas J. Shields of the Southern District of Iowa and senior-status U.S. District Judge Frederic Block of the Eastern District of New York, each of whom took five trips.

O'Scannlain declined to comment for this story. In an email, Kaplan wrote that the “seminars offer a valuable opportunity for new judicial appointees to enhance their knowledge and skills in complex areas of the law,” including economics.

Wolle, Real and O’Scannlain are all listed as seminar sponsors, though records do not indicate how much they contributed.

The Center identified instances where judges who attended seminars underwritten by certain firms and trade groups later issued rulings in the funders’ favor.

EPA loses case

In April 2009, for example, Jolly traveled to Northwestern University to attend the “Criminalization of Corporate Conduct” seminar sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 13 other funders.

Last August, Jolly wrote the majority 2-1 opinion declaring that the Environmental Protection Agency broke the law when it rejected a Texas emissions cap generally supported by the fossil fuels industry.

“It looks as if [corporations] are buying influence, even if it’s not true.” — Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor

Jolly, who did not respond to requests for comment, sided with two of the petitioners in the suit — the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber.

Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor who specializes in judicial ethics, is skeptical that rulings are directly influenced by corporate sponsors of seminars, but noted, “in a cynic’s view that would smack of corruption.”

“Even if it has no effect in terms of the decisions judges make, the perception of influence matters a great deal,” he says. “It looks as if [corporations] are buying influence, even if it’s not true.”

Another attendee of the 2009 “Criminalization of Corporate Conduct” seminar was Barbier, the Eastern District of Louisiana jurist presiding over a high-profile BP civil trial, which is being held without a jury in New Orleans.

Barbier is in charge of considering whether BP owes billions of dollars in fines for gross negligence leading to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion and spill. The disaster killed 11 people and contaminated a large swath of the Gulf Coast.

In 2011, Barbier dismissed a wrongful-death claim in a suit brought against ExxonMobil and Chevron USA by the widow of a worker who was exposed to radioactive materials found on the companies’ equipment.

Barbier’s ruling in favor of the oil companies came two years after he attended the corporate conduct seminar, funded in part by ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, according to documents. The judge did not respond to requests for comment.

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Corporate U?

George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center hosted 45 seminars while Northwestern University’s Judicial Education Program hosted 29. A total of 136 federal judges reported attending conferences conducted by the schools during the 4 1/2-year period analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity.

The remaining top five conference hosts, including The Sedona Conference and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), collectively organized 28 conferences.

The Koch Foundation and The Searle Freedom Trust supported most of the conferences organized by George Mason and Northwestern. The energy industry was a sponsor in roughly three-fourths of the conferences hosted by Northwestern.

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, major supporters of conservative causes, and their foundations have given millions to George Mason University. As the Center recently reported, the George Mason University Foundation received $4.4 million in 2011 from the Charles Koch Foundation, making up 15 percent of its revenue that year.

The school is the top recipient of Koch foundation money since 1985. George Mason also houses several free market and libertarian research centers, including the Institute for Humane Studies, which received $3.7 million from the Koch foundations, and the Mercatus Center, whose board of directors includes Charles Koch.

Officials from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation did not return phone calls seeking comment for this report.

The Judicial Conference disclosure policy doesn’t require seminar hosts to reveal how much donors contribute to conferences. But corporate-giving reports and nonprofit tax records shed some light on the costs.

Oil industry support

In 2011, for example, ExxonMobil reported giving $20,000 to George Mason specifically for its judicial training program. The oil company gave an additional $30,000 to the university’s Law & Economics Center, which hosts the conferences. Between 2003 and 2007, the ExxonMobil Foundation gave the think tank $150,000.

ExxonMobil officials did not respond to requests for comment.

“It’s the funders that create the problem … The money comes from interests that have matters before the courts, and they’d like to have those matters settled in their favor.” — Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics

Another seminar funder, Donors Trust, gave George Mason’s Law & Economics Center nearly $450,000 in general support in 2010. As the Center reported, Donors Trust helps conservative foundations and individuals give money anonymously to nonprofits that may take controversial positions.

A representative of Donors Trust declined to comment for this story.

The :{Searle :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:Freedom Trust, a foundation advocating “economic liberty” that regularly donates to conservative groups like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, contributed a combined $400,000 to George Mason’s judicial education programs in 2010 and 2011.

The school conducted conferences on antitrust law as well as “Corporations and the Limits of Criminal Law,” both funded by AT&T, BB&T, BP America, Cigna, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, FedEx Corp. and others.

“The Moral Foundations of Capitalism” was funded by the same group, and was the most popular George Mason conference, drawing at least 10 federal judges.

BP spokesman Scott Dean says the company has no record of ever directly contributing to the seminars but he did say BP gave the law school and the Law & Economics Center more than $37,000 between 2001 and 2008.

Seminars at Northwestern are hosted by the school’s Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth. The think tank, according to its website, was founded in 2006 thanks to a “generous grant” from Daniel C. Searle, the late pharmaceutical industry executive.

In 2009, the foundation gave $200,000 to Northwestern’s Searle Center for its judicial education program.

Another Northwestern seminar funder, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation — a major supporter of conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation — gave $210,000 to the Searle Center between 2008 and 2010.

Records show corporate sponsorship at Northwestern was highest from 2008 through 2010, when a man named Henry Butler — now in charge of George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center — ran the Searle Center.

Daniel Rodriguez, dean of Northwestern University’s School of Law, says corporate sponsorships at the school “ended the moment Butler left.�� Rodriguez, who became the dean of Northwestern’s law school last year, says the school recently decided to terminate the programs. He says he’s against corporate sponsorship of judicial seminars.

“These programs should be free from any real or perceived conflict of interest,” he says.

Related: Find a judge

Related story: Judges often ignore trip disclosure rules

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Some history

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, advocacy groups and raised concerns about judges attending privately funded conferences conducted in vacation destinations like Arizona, Montana and Florida.

Critics claimed that the undisclosed trips created conflicts of interest and cast doubt on the ability of judges to decide cases without bias.

Seminars hosted by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) attracted the most attention.

FREE, a Montana-based think tank championing “free-market environmentalism,” drew criticism for its ideologically conservative seminars. In 2011, for example, FREE hosted “Terrorism, Climate & Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty & the Rule of Law.”

Critics complained that judges spent their free time golfing, fishing and horseback riding at the conference’s Montana resort location. They worried that judges were being wined, dined and entertained by FREE’s funders, which included Koch Industries and Texaco Inc. (now part of Chevron Corp.).

Media scrutiny prompted members of Congress in 2000 to introduce legislation that would prohibit judges from accepting “anything of value in connection with a seminar.” The bill, which died in committee, was opposed by the Judicial Conference, which claimed it restricted judges�� free speech rights.

Similar legislation failed again in 2003.

In 2007, the Judicial Conference implemented a policy designed to provide “greater transparency” by setting up disclosure requirements for both judges and seminar hosts.

“Instead of banning anything,” says Geyh, the policy “was a way to mollify those who recognized the perception problem without causing the ones who treat [the conferences] as a First Amendment issue to go ballistic.”

Buying influence?

Even with the new policy, the seminars still have critics.

“These seminars are taking place because large corporate interests are hoping to influence the outcome of cases involving themselves or likeminded entities,” says Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal organization that first raised concerns about judicial education conferences in a 1993 report titled “Justice for Sale.”

Russell Wheeler, former deputy director of the Federal Judicial Center, an education and research agency for the federal courts, says it’s possible that funders could be truly dedicated to improving judges’ understanding of the law.

But, he says, “You’ve got to be pretty naïve to believe that.”

“It's the funders that create the problem,” says Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics. “The money comes from interests that have matters before the courts, and they’d like to have those matters settled in their favor.”

“I’m not going to be snowed by anybody’s presentation.” �� Chief Judge Thomas B. Bennett of the Northern District of Alabama Bankruptcy Court

Many of the seminars are conservative in nature, especially those hosted by George Mason. But there are a few exceptions. A June 2010 conference sponsored by the Open Society Institute, a foundation founded by liberal investor George Soros, focused mainly on human rights law. (The Center for Public Integrity and The Lens have received funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.)

Events hosted by the Sedona Conference, a nonprofit whose seminars address legal issues like antitrust law and intellectual property, have been funded primarily by law firms.

Speaking from the right

According to The Center for Public Integrity’s analysis, the person who spoke at more judicial conferences than any other was Butler, a professor and prominent conservative formerly of Northwestern and now executive director of George Mason’s Law & Economics Center.

He has taught judicial seminar courses with titles like “Economic Thinking” and “Economics of Insurance.” A former Republican candidate for Congress — he lost a 1992 bid — Butler was a “Koch Distinguished Professor of Law and Economics” at the University of Kansas.

Butler’s resume cites his “professional affiliations” with the conservative Federalist Society and the Mont Pelerin Society, which decries society’s loss of freedoms “fostered by a decline of belief in private property and the competitive market.”

Butler declined to be interviewed for this story. In response to emailed questions about George Mason’s judicial seminars, he wrote, “You seem to have a well-established theme to your story, accordingly we don’t see any advantage in collaborating with you.”

Daniel Polsby, dean of the George Mason University School of Law, also declined to answer questions for this story other than to say via email: “We’re very proud of the activities and programs of the Law & Economics Center.”

Another frequent seminar instructor is Terry L. Anderson, president of the Property and Environment Research Center, a conservative think tank “dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets.”

Anderson, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, has regularly led “Free Market Environmentalism” lectures at conferences hosted by both George Mason and Northwestern.

Green energy’s ‘false promise’

In January 2011, Anderson was one of four lecturers who spoke at George Mason’s “Advanced Institute on Environmental Economics” conference, which was funded in part by ExxonMobil, BP America and Shell Oil.

The other three speakers were Andrew Morriss, co-author of the book “The False Promise of Green Energy”; Robert K. Fleck, an economics professor who has received thousands of dollars in research grants from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation; and Jason Johnston, a former fellow with the Koch-funded, Anderson-led Property and Environment Research Center and a critic of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“I don’t express views” during lectures, says Anderson. He says his talks are based strictly on economic analysis. “None of my lectures are aimed at changing any judge��s opinion” about a case before them in court.

George Mason law professor Todd J. Zywicki, another regular judicial program speaker, has taught judges about issues like mortgage markets and consumer credit.

He is a senior scholar at the school’s conservative Mercatus Center, and has ties to the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is ��dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty.” Zywicki did not respond to a request for comment.

George Mason “is known to stage conferences that have a conservative economic perspective,” says Gillers, the NYU law professor.

One frequent attendee of George Mason’s judicial seminars, Judge Bennett of Alabama bankruptcy court, told the Center “I’m not going to be snowed by anybody’s presentation.�� He said he finds the seminars “infinitely invaluable.”

“You can accumulate information much more quickly than if you sit in your office and read stuff,” he says.

Bennett dismisses criticism of George Mason’s judicial conferences — even though he acknowledges that they often feature conservative voices.

“I believe they put on a fairly balanced program,” he says, noting that he doesn’t pay attention to who funds the conferences. "I’ve been to George Mason seminars where they’ve had people who are not conservative. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

Stacked panels?

Northwestern’s 2009 seminar titled “Criminalization of Corporate Conduct” included a speaker panel that was very corporate-friendly — something George Mason’s Henry Butler openly acknowledged during his presentation summing up the day’s events.

Butler noted “a question can be raised” about the panels’ balance and “do we have enough people here that are representing the prosecutor’s perspective.” (His remarks are posted on YouTube ./maxresdefault.jpg).) “And I certainly can plead guilty to that accusation.”

“On the other hand,” he continued, “I have to explain to you that we’ve had difficulty in the past getting the U.S. attorneys to participate in these programs.”

The December 2010 “Climate Change Litigation” session hosted by George Mason’s Law & Economics Center was sponsored in part by BP America, ExxonMobil and Shell Oil, and featured four speakers.

Two were attorneys who have represented corporate clients like Koch Industries and ExxonMobil. A third speaker, Johnston, the former Property and Environment Research Center fellow, spent part of his presentation criticizing the American civil courts system for making American companies less competitive on the international stage.

Butler, who moderated the panel, acknowledged the imbalance as he introduced a last-minute replacement for the fourth panelist.

“Eric Mayer is going to be pro-public nuisance, climate-change litigation cases, and the other three are basically going to express some skepticism,” Butler said in his introduction, identifying Mayer, a lawyer who has represented plaintiffs as well as corporate defendants.

The announcement drew laughs from panelists and audience members.

"This may seem unbalanced,” Butler continued, “but Eric is not daunted by this challenge at all.”

Donor names disappear

The “transparency” policy regarding judicial trips may be weak, but the names of the corporations, foundations and individuals that pay for the conferences at least are available to the public.

Now, even that bit of sunshine is clouding over.

In 2012, George Mason's Law & Economics Center began listing “xyz corp.,” as a sponsor before listing itself as the only donor on official disclosure documents. However, the think tank does provide a list of donors on its website.

The 2007 Judicial Conference policy allows such reporting if the support comes from general revenues or from endowments or gifts “not raised for the particular educational program or for the purpose of educating judges.”

Geyh, the Indiana University law professor, says the policy enables conference hosts to shield their donors and make it tough for judges to identify potential conflicts before attending seminars.

“It does raise transparency issues,” he says. “It strikes me as some semantic game-playing with the rules.”

This story was originally published by The Center for Public Integrity, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. It was reported and written by Chris Young, Reity O'Brien and Andrea Fuller; John Dunbar contributed.

Yet another thrust of the corporate political agenda was the fostering

of a sympathetic climate for corporate anti-regulatory ideology

among the federal judiciary. To this end, several pro-corporate foundations

developed "judicial education” seminars, which involved free trips

for federal judges to attend training sessions at resorts such as Marco

Island, Florida.

Here corporate perspectives on environmental regulations,

anti-trust law, and other topics were presented along with golf,

fishing, and other recreations. The organization that pioneered the judge

junkets, the Law and Economics Center, was founded in 1974 and

funded by a number of corporations such as Ford Motor Company, Abbott

Laboratories, and Proctor and Gamble, as well as right-wing foun.. 173

dations such as the Carthage Foundation and the Olin Foundation.

LEC’s program included such seminars as “Misconceptions About Environmental

Pollution and Cancer.” Later, additional conservative

groups joined the judicial education movement, including the Foundation

for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) and the

Liberty Fund. Topics at a typical seminar sponsored by FREE at the

Elkhorn Ranch in Big Sky, Montana, included “The Environment.a

CEO’s Perspective,” taught by retired Texaco CEO Alfred DeCrane,

“Progressive Myths and the Lords of Yesteryear,” and “Why We Should

Run Public Lands Like Businesses.”

According to LEC’s newsletter, many judges reported that the

seminars had “totally altered their frame of reference for cases involving

economic issues.” One such judge was Spencer Williams, who attended

a Law and Economics seminar at the Key Biscayne Hotel in Miami

while presiding over a predatory pricing case being heard in U.S. district

court. Returning from the seminar, the judge overturned a jury’s

decision that would have awarded $15 million to the plaintiff. In a letter

to the LEC, Williams wrote, “As a result of my better understanding of

the concept of marginal costs, I have recently set aside a $15 million

anti-trust verdict.” gangs of am

(milloy has org w sim name?)

The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) based in Bozeman, Montana, is a prime engine for free market environmentalism in the area of education.

Preaching reliance on market mechanisms and private property rights, rather than on environmental law, for protection of the environment, its chairperson, John Baden (a past member of the National Petroleum Council), stresses decentralization - a shift of control from what he calls "Green platonic despots in D.C." to "local interests." He has written, apparently in all seriousness, that the agenda of FREE is "the norm among progressive, intellectually honest and successful environmentalists."

One of FREE's current projects is the "Charter Forest" scheme, in which the national forests would no longer operate under the "multiple use" mandate. Rather, each forest would be are managed by whatever industry would be able to realize the greatest profit.

For more than ten years, FREE has been offering expense-paid seminars in its philosophy to federal judges. (View a copy of an invitation).

Seminars, held primarily at resorts and private ranches in Montana, with good access to trout streams and golf courses, include such topics as "The Environment: A CEO's Perspective" and "Liberty and the Environment: A Case for Judicial Activism". In the late nineties, FREE boasted that nearly a third of the federal judiciary had either attended or was seeking to attend its seminars, this as the Bush Administration now strives to pack federal benches with rightist judges. The group also offers expense-paid courses for university faculty and students, these reportedly taught on the campus of Montana State University.

Between August 14-19, 2004, FREE hosted the 2004 general meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.