Thirty-one U.S. federal appeals court judges have on 76 occasions since 2021 attended privately-funded seminars at luxury resorts, events that despite being billed as educational look more like paid vacations, a judicial watchdog group Fix the Court said in a letter to the head of the federal judiciary’s administrative arm. The group said the apparent luxury and ideological nature of some seminars appears inconsistent with Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges, which holds: “A judge must avoid all impropriety and appearance of impropriety in all activities.”
In June, for example, five judges reported attending a weeklong event sponsored by George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School at the Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, Alaska. One talk was on “bad” Supreme Court decisions. Suggested reading included an essay on why the court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, which the judges are bound to follow, was among its “worst” decisions of all time. Read more.
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If you are an executive at a company embarking on an internal investigation of your conduct, you should be very, very careful about any joint engagement letter you sign with the company’s outside counsel. That might seem obvious, but an opinion issued last week by Judge Laura Taylor Swain of Manhattan in the criminal fraud case against onetime Allianz portfolio manager Gregoire Tournant shows the outsized risk to corporate executives who agree to cooperate with outside lawyers whose primary allegiance is to the company. Alison Frankel has the story.
Check out other recent pieces from all our columnists: Alison Frankel, Jenna Greene and Hassan Kanu
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