Watchdogs Want Judicial Spouse ‘Disclosure Loophole’ Closed

Government and judicial watchdog groups are urging Congress to close a “disclosure loophole” they say allows potential judicial conflicts to fall through the cracks.

Under the Ethics in Government Act, federal judges and justices currently only need to list their spouse’s employer—not their clients or amount of compensation they received.

That “means a judicial spouse could earn untold sums, via legal or consulting work, from entities that have cases before their husband or wife, and the public would be none the wiser, so long as the entities paid their employer and not the spouse directly,” one of the groups, Fix the Court, said in a statement Thursday.

The group, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Free Law Project, and Project On Government Oversight wrote a letter to Congress urging them to amend the law to require the disclosure of any entity that paid either the spouse or their employer $5,000 or more for legal and consulting work.

The suggestion comes amid renewed concerns about the work of the justices’ spouses, including longtime conservative activist Ginni Thomas and the newest high-court spouse, Patrick Jackson. Earlier this year, now Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she’d “inadvertently omitted” information in her financial disclosure forms regarding consulting income her physician spouse earned in medical malpractice cases.

The law would apply beyond the US Supreme Court to include all federal judges.

The new disclosures wouldn’t require judges to remove themselves from cases outright, but would instead give the public “a better sense if a certain entity or entities were responsible for the bulk of a spouse’s annual income,” Fix the Court said.