Roberts pleads for judicial independence to regain trust

WASHINGTON — Amid a drop in public confidence in the Supreme Court and calls for increasing its membership, Chief Justice John Roberts devoted his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary to a plea for judicial independence.

“The judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and coequal branch of government,” he wrote in the report released Friday evening.

The report comes less than a month after a bipartisan commission appointed by President Biden finished its work studying changes to the federal judiciary. While that panel analyzed proposals like imposing 18year term limits on justices and expanding, or “packing,” the court with additional justices, much of Roberts’ report was focused on thwarting less contentious efforts by Congress to address financial conflicts and workplace misconduct in the judicial system. Both issues are the subject of proposed legislation that has drawn bipartisan support.

Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit group that has called for stricter ethics rules for the Supreme Court, said Roberts faced an uphill battle.

“Chief Justice Roberts is taking a page from his old playbook: acknowledging institutional challenges in the judiciary but telling the public that only we judges can fix them,” Roth said. “Yet the problems of overlooked financial conflicts and sexual harassment are serious and endemic, and there’s no indication they’re going away. So Congress has every right to step in.”

Roberts addressed at some length a recent series of articles in the Wall Street Journal that found that 131 federal judges had violated a federal law by hearing 685 lawsuits between 2010 and 2018 that involved companies in which they or their families owned shares of stock.

“Let me be crystal clear: The judiciary takes this matter seriously,” Roberts wrote. “We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards, and those judges violated an ethics rule. But I do want to put these lapses in context.

“According to the Wall

Street Journal’s own data,” he wrote, “the 685 instances identified amount to a very small fraction — less than threehundredths of 1% — of the 2.5 million civil cases filed in the district courts in the nine years included in the study.”

Roberts called for more rigorous ethics training and better systems of conflict checks.

Roberts also touched on what he called “the continuing concern over inappropriate behavior in the judicial workplace.”

The issue had been a topic in several of the chief justice’s reports since 2017, when Judge Alex

Kozinski, who had served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, for more than three decades, announced his retirement after the Washington Post reported that 15 women had accused him of sexual harassment.

Roberts wrote that the judiciary had taken many steps to make its workplaces safe, including revising its procedures to “provide robust mechanisms for reporting and addressing instances of misconduct.”