Confirmation hearings for federal judges don’t examine how a nominee’s wealth may impact their rulings on constitutional questions.
The chief justice of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals thinks they should.
“There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench,” Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in a dissenting opinion [PDF] last month, “but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist: No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter.”
Kozinski’s dissent took issue with the appellate court’s ruling in United States vs. Pineda-Moreno, which effectively granted law enforcement the authority to enter private driveways and install tracking devices on cars without a court order.
The judge, appointed by President Reagan, says income group shapes judicial philosophy in the same way as racial history and political party affiliation do.
People in lower-income brackets are arguably more vulnerable to unlawful search and seizure.
Continuing on this theme, Kozinski wrote of his colleagues:
When you glide your BMW into your underground garage or behind an electric gate, you don’t need to worry that somebody might attach a tracking device to it while you sleep. But the Constitution doesn’t prefer the rich over the poor; the man who parks his car next to his trailer is entitled to the same privacy and peace of mind as the man whose urban fortress is guarded by the Bel Air Patrol.
The appellate court judges’ financial disclosures appear (posted online courtesy of Judicial Watch) to support Kozinski’s contention that they can afford indoor parking. My quick, completely unscientific analysis of disclosures by four of the circuit’s judges (selected at random) found all had at minimum several hundred thousand dollars in investments.
The jurists only provide value ranges for their investments, making it impossible to divine exactly what they are worth.
For example, Judge Pamela Ann Rymer reported in 2009 [PDF] having a wide variety of investments worth at least $810,000 (though the real number could easily exceed a million dollars). Judge Otto R. Skopil disclosed [PDF] that the vast majority of his savings was in U.S. Treasury notes, worth somewhere between $300,000 and $750,000.
Big paychecks are expected to be a just reward for excellent work by talented attorneys, making it difficult to achieve economic diversity at the highest level of our justice system. Meanwhile, Obama has worked to expand diversity on the federal bench using traditional demographic details.
“So far he is setting records for the number of women and minorities nominated to lifetime appointments,” USA Today reported in June. “Nearly half of the 73 candidates he has tapped for the bench have been women. In all, 25 percent have been African Americans, 10 percent Hispanics and 11 percent Asian Americans.”
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