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Forget The Supreme Court's Actual Corruption, Justices' Tantrums And Lies Would Imperil A Normal Lawyer's Job

Lying to Congress, being a dick to congresspeople and neighbors alike, having an unlikable spouse -- check, check, check on the long list of things any normal legal practitioner would need to be concerned about.

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During the pandemic, one of the partners I used to work with sent out an all-attorney email asking if anyone currently represented any business trying to resist the mandatory shutdown orders. Another partner, quick on the “reply all” button, responded, “God, I hope not.”

It turns out another person on the email chain was indeed representing such a business and was not thrilled about the comment. The offending partner was gone a few weeks later. I don’t think the snarky reply comprised the sole justification for her ouster — other long-simmering resentments were present — but it sure didn’t help matters. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and, just like that, a decades-long relationship was severed.

That sort of thing happens all the time in the legal profession (more often at some firms than at others). Lawyers can lose their jobs on the thinnest of pretexts. This is something a good portion of today’s Supreme Court has long since forgotten having to care about.

A new tally of the “gifts” Supreme Court justices have received over the past 20 years found that they have raked in at least $6,592,657 worth of gratuities from well-heeled benefactors (this is likely an undercount, and, of course, is above and beyond their already generous salaries and honoraria for semi-legitimate teaching gigs). One justice is far worse in this department than the others: according to the new report, Justice Clarence Thomas alone raked in $5,879,796 from, let’s just call them what they really are, bribes.

Any other lawyer would not have even had to resort to the actual corruption continually roiling today’s Supreme Court to wind up out on the streets. Since ProPublica first called Thomas out on failing to disclose his gifts, which is clearly required by law, Thomas has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong. Faced with intense scrutiny, Thomas has since amended some of his old disclosure forms, though in a statement last year Thomas’s attorney said, “after reviewing Justice Thomas’s records, I am confident there has been no willful ethics transgression.”

Yeah, right. Americans aren’t dumb enough to buy that. A person does not accumulate almost $6 million worth of stuff that that person did not earn, and then try to cover it up, without having knowingly done something wrong.

Obvious and blatant dishonesty: there’s plenty right there to get a regular lawyer fired. What will happen to Thomas now that we all know he’s a liar (and, you know, took close to $6 million from GOP megadonors who like the way he decides cases)? Absolutely nothing, at least as long as Republicans continue to control the House of Representatives.

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Justice Samuel Alito holds the dubious distinction of being the second-most graft happy sitting Supreme Court justice. You don’t even have to get close to Alito’s unholy financial windfalls though to find a whole laundry list of things that would be fireable offenses almost anywhere else in the legal industry other than the Supreme Court.

Many states have no protections whatsoever to shield workers in the private sector from employment-related discrimination based on political activity, so getting caught flying two different insurrection flags at your two different homes could get lawyers in a number of jurisdictions canned right there. Then there’s Alito’s pugnacious letter to several senators in which he tries to blame the controversy on his wife and appears to have been caught in several lies relating to a childish dispute the Alitos had with their neighbors. Lying to Congress, being a dick to congresspeople and neighbors alike, having an unlikable spouse — check, check, check on the long list of things any normal legal practitioner would need to be concerned about if interested in keeping his or her job.

Lifetime tenure was supposed to insulate Supreme Court justices from political pressure. Instead it’s being used by a few of the sitting justices to insulate themselves from facing any consequences for bad behavior — behavior that would get anyone else in any other legal job into a lot of trouble.

There is nothing particularly special about Supreme Court justices. They aren’t any smarter than the rest of us, they certainly are not the most ethical people the legal profession has to offer, and nothing they’ve accomplished gives them any right to look down their noses at the people they are supposed to be serving. Underneath the robes, they’re just like the rest of us. It’s high time they remembered that.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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