Nice Work If You Can Get It

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I’ll put this in plain English, because the people who profit from the arrangement would rather you got lost in the legalese.

Federal judges have been impeached and removed from the bench for doing what John Roberts has been doing for sixteen years.

None of what follows is secret, and I did not personally uncover any of it. It sits in the public record. Whistleblower filings sent to Congress, sworn testimony, internal company spreadsheets, federal disclosure forms, and reporting by mainstream outlets going back years. I did not find anything new. I read what was already there, put the facts in order, and asked why the Chief Justice of the United States is held to a lower standard than any other federal judge.

In 2007, two years after her husband became Chief Justice of the United States, Jane Roberts left the practice of law and became a legal recruiter. She turned out to be an extraordinary one. Internal company spreadsheets, filed with Congress by a whistleblower and first reported by Business Insider, show that over a seven year period she earned $10,323,842.70 in commissions on $13.3 million in attributed firm revenue.

A partner at her firm, Major, Lindsey and Africa, described her under oath as the highest earning recruiter in the entire company by a wide margin. Not the best that year. Not near the top. The highest of anyone, by a wide margin, in a firm full of professional recruiters who did nothing but place lawyers all day. From the start, she out-earned people who had done the job for decades. She out-earned people with bigger networks and longer track records. So ask the plain question. Why would one recruiter be paid so much more than every colleague doing the exact same work? The one thing she had that none of them had was a husband who is the Chief Justice of the United States.

Here is how that pay worked. A recruiter like Jane Roberts gets a cut of the compensation of the lawyer she places. Place more lawyers, place bigger lawyers at bigger salaries, and the checks get larger. Her pay rose and fell with her performance, which is the ordinary way commission works and the opposite of how salary works.

Now look at who wrote those checks. Her clients included WilmerHale and Hogan Lovells, two of the busiest appellate firms in the country, the kind of firms that send a lawyer to argue at the Supreme Court term after term. Her husband is the Chief Justice of that Court. Across his two decades there, the firms paying his household in commissions have argued in front of him have argued before him repeatedly, term after term. He recused from none of them on the ground that his wife was being paid by the firm arguing the case. There is a reason justices are required to report a spouse’s income on their disclosure forms. The phrase household income matters when your job requires impartiality.

You might be thinking: she helps companies hire lawyers, people do that every day, what is wrong with it? Nothing, when an ordinary recruiter does it. A recruiter placing lawyers for a paycheck is a normal job, and on its own it raises no question at all. Change one fact and the whole thing changes. The recruiter is married to the Chief Justice of the United States, and her clients are the firms that argue in his courtroom. Now the same paycheck means something different. A firm hiring an ordinary recruiter is buying recruiting. A firm hiring the Chief Justice’s wife, and paying her substantially more than anyone else doing that job, is buying recruiting plus something extra, and the something extra is a financial relationship with the family of the judge who will decide their cases.

Let me say it plainly. The firms paying his household were the firms arguing in his courtroom. Hiring his wife was worth more to them than her work alone, because it bought them something no other recruiter could offer, a paid relationship with the family of the most powerful judge in the country. They paid for access. They paid to have the wife of the Chief Justice on their payroll, to be in the room with her, to earn the goodwill that comes with signing her checks, and quite possibly to meet the man himself along the way. And then those same firms walked into his courtroom and argued their cases, and he ruled. So the picture is uncomplicated. The firms that argue in front of him were paying his wife far more than they paid anyone else who did her job, and then they stood at his bench and he ruled on their cases.

open.substack.com - Judges get removed from the bench

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