George Mason’s Scalia Law College is a generous employer for Supreme Court justices, data show

Nice Work if you can get it

U.S. Supreme Courtroom justices can lawfully only gain outdoors earnings from specified resources, mostly crafting textbooks, investments, and instructing. George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law College has made a deliberate effort and hard work to employ the service of conservative justices as lecturers — and “strategic property” it its campaign to make Scalia Legislation “a Yale or Harvard of conservative authorized scholarship and influence,” The New York Instances studies, citing interior information it acquired by means of flexibility of information and facts requests and other paperwork. 

George Mason, a general public college in northern Virginia, set up its law university in the late 1970s, and it always had a conservative bent, the Situations experiences. But it jump-began its marketing campaign to come to be a central cog in the conservative judicial ecosystem when it altered its name just after Scalia’s dying in 2016. The rebranding was “the final result of a $30 million gift brokered by Leonard Leo, primary architect of a grand challenge then gathering pressure to rework the federal judiciary and further more the legal imperatives of the correct,” the Instances notes.

Interior documents exhibit that the legislation school thought of “creating a solid romantic relationship” with Scalia’s substitute, Justice Neil Gorsuch, “a activity-shifting opportunity.” Gorsuch was invited to support decide on the Italian city in which he would instruct a two-7 days seminar during the summer months of 2017 — they chose Padua — and by the winter of 2019, Justices Clarance Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh have been also on Scalia Regulation college, the Instances experiences. Kavanaugh was flown to England for his teaching career. Thomas teaches at the Virginia campus.

“For educating summertime programs that commonly ran for up to two months, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh each and every created salaries that approached the authorized cap on specified exterior income, about $30,000 in new years,” the Moments reports. The college protected at the very least travel and housing for the justices and their households. “Some of this seems like all-fees-compensated holidays, with a minor instructing thrown in,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the College of Virginia who specializes in authorized ethics, tells the Moments. 

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas also frequently utilized Supreme Court docket staff members to prepare for their exterior educating, violating an advisory the justices say they voluntarily comply with, the Occasions reviews. And a quantity of their co-professors have filed amicus briefs that the justices sometimes cite in oral arguments or thoughts. Browse extra about this peek driving the Supreme Court’s tightly drawn curtains at The New York Occasions.