George Mason’s Scalia Regulation School is a generous employer for Supreme Court docket justices, data exhibit

Wonderful Do the job if you can get it

U.S. Supreme Court docket justices can legally only gain outdoors money from specific sources, generally crafting guides, investments, and teaching. George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law Faculty has made a deliberate effort and hard work to hire conservative justices as lecturers — and “strategic property” it its marketing campaign to make Scalia Legislation “a Yale or Harvard of conservative lawful scholarship and affect,” The New York Situations experiences, citing internal records it received via liberty of info requests and other files. 

George Mason, a community university in northern Virginia, founded its regulation faculty in the late 1970s, and it constantly experienced a conservative bent, the Times reviews. But it jump-commenced its campaign to become a central cog in the conservative judicial ecosystem when it changed its identify right after Scalia’s demise in 2016. The rebranding was “the end result of a $30 million present brokered by Leonard Leo, key architect of a grand undertaking then gathering pressure to change the federal judiciary and more the authorized imperatives of the appropriate,” the Periods notes.

Interior documents present that the legislation faculty thought of “making a powerful romance” with Scalia’s replacement, Justice Neil Gorsuch, “a match-transforming opportunity.” Gorsuch was invited to assistance choose the Italian city in which he would educate a two-7 days seminar during the summertime of 2017 — they chose Padua — and by the wintertime of 2019, Justices Clarance Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh were also on Scalia Law faculty, the Occasions stories. Kavanaugh was flown to England for his instructing task. Thomas teaches at the Virginia campus.

“For training summer programs that frequently ran for up to two months, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh every single created salaries that approached the authorized cap on selected exterior income, approximately $30,000 in the latest a long time,” the Occasions studies. The college protected at minimum journey and housing for the justices and their people. “Some of this seems like all-expenses-paid out holidays, with a very little instructing thrown in,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in lawful ethics, tells the Times. 

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas also consistently employed Supreme Court docket personnel to prepare for their outdoors instructing, violating an advisory the justices say they voluntarily comply with, the Times stories. And a quantity of their co-professors have filed amicus briefs that the justices sometimes cite in oral arguments or thoughts. Examine a lot more about this peek powering the Supreme Court’s tightly drawn curtains at The New York Occasions.