Cont'd from above
Barrett’s home sale
There are personal connections between the Religious Liberty Initiative and the high court as well.
A few months after Justice Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in at the Supreme Court in 2020, leaving her appellate court judgeship and job as a Notre Dame law professor, she sold her private residence to a recently hired professor who was taking on a leadership position at the initiative. Accountable.us, a left-leaning non-profit group, discovered the home sale.
Neither Barrett’s real estate deal nor Alito’s appearance in Italy appear to violate any of the court’s ethics rules, according to several experts interviewed by CNN.
“It raises a question – not so much of corruption as such, but of whether disclosures, our current system of disclosures, is adequate to the task,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University in St. Louis Law School professor who specializes in government ethics, of Barrett’s real estate transaction.
Accountable.us president Kyle Herrig said in a statement: “Every federal judge is bound to an ethics code requiring them to avoid behavior that so much as looks improper, except for Supreme Court justices. Chief Justice (John) Roberts has the power to change that, but so far he hasn’t shown the courage. If he fails to do his job, Congress must do theirs.”
The sale of Barrett’s South Bend, Indiana, home to Brendan Wilson, a Washington, DC, attorney who was moving to the state to work for the law school and serve on the initiative’s leadership team, for $905,000 was not required to be disclosed on annual financial forms at the court. Federal regulations exempt sales of the “personal residence of the filer and the filer’s spouse” from transactions federal judges are required to report.
The home sold in May 2021 and Wilson started at Notre Dame that August. In a
news release from late 2021 announcing he and two others had joined the group, Wilson is quoted as saying, “When we were presented with the opportunity to move back to South Bend, and to work with the Religious Liberty Initiative, we both felt it was the prompting of the Holy Spirit.”
But given Wilson’s role at the initiative and the work its legal clinic is involved in, some experts said the sale is yet another reason why some rules at the Supreme Court should be changed to provide the public with a more robust understanding of connections between the justices and those involved in legal advocacy before the nation’s highest court.
“The court, frankly, it faces a kind of legitimacy crisis because of the really dire weaknesses of its ethics,” Clark said. “It has the opportunity to address that legitimacy crisis by, you know, stepping up its ethics game – imposing on itself and then abiding by additional disclosure operations.”
At the court, even the slightest appearance of impropriety raises red flags with Democratic lawmakers and watchdog groups, some of which have lodged formal complaints against justices to the Judicial Conference for actions they deem problematic.
Barrett’s home sale to Wilson makes her the third member of the Supreme Court who has made money from property transactions with influential conservative figures or people with close connections to legal advocacy before the nation’s highest court.
Barrett did not respond to a request for comment.
After Thomas’ deal with Crow was revealed, Politico reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a vacation home in 2017 he co-owned to the chief executive of a major law firm that has argued cases before the court and didn’t name the buyer in his disclosure forms.
Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University and a legal ethics expert, stressed that although Barrett’s home sale did not violate any rules, it presents a “perception problem” for a court already facing intense public scrutiny.
“It is addressed by the court being much more vigilant in guarding against perception problems created by (the justices’) financial wheelings and dealings and going the extra mile to make sure that they not only are clean, but look clean,” he said.
The initiative and lawyers associated with it have filed at least nine amicus briefs before the Supreme Court since the sale went through, urging rulings in favor of conservative positions on issues like abortion, school prayer, and coronavirus restrictions on churches.
Barclay told CNN that many people connected with the group help compile the briefs they submit to the court, but stressed that Wilson “really could not be further removed from Supreme Court litigation.”
A brief biography for Wilson on the group’s page says he is responsible “for the transactional component of the Religious Liberty Clinic.” A recent job
posting from the RLI explained the clinic’s transactional component includes legal work advising religiously affiliated organizations.
Concerns about ethics and transparency at the Supreme Court have been reignited this week after Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged attending a luxury fishing trip on the private jet of a conservative hedge fund manager.
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