D.C. Bar To Weigh Complaint Filed Against Chief Justice Roberts Over Millions Paid to His Wife for Law Firm Recruiting

The District of Columbia Bar has set a date of September 10 to weigh whether Chief Justice Roberts violated his professional ethics obligations in respect of his wife’s lucrative career — a preliminary step that nevertheless raises the specter of disciplinary punishment, of which disbarment is the most severe variety. A complaint to the bar — of which Chief Justice Roberts has been a member since 1981, immediately after he graduated from Harvard Law School — was lodged in April by journalist Chris Armitage. It concerns some $10 million in commissions that the chief’s wife, Jane Roberts, reportedly received during her time, between 2007 and 2019, at the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa. Mr. Armitage alleges that those earnings were not properly reported.When Chief Justice Roberts acceded to the high court, Mrs. Roberts, also an attorney, pivoted her career to legal recruiting, saying that her husband’s job “made it awkward to be practicing law.”“There are many paths to a good life. People are probably not going to be in the same job for 40 years. There are so many interesting things to do if you’re open to change and opportunity,” Mrs. Roberts said in 2021.This latest complaint, citing the federal statute that mandates how ethics allegations against judges ought to be handled, argues that the D.C. bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel failed to properly investigate whether that $10 million was properly reported. The bar’s rules note that disciplinary punishment can ensue “whether or not the act or omission occurred in the course of an attorney-client relationship.” The New York Sun reached out to the Supreme Court for comment. The payments to Mrs. Roberts from large law firms like WilmerHale, Hogan Lovells, and Davis Polk were disclosed in a whistleblower complaint to Congress in 2022 by a Major, Lindsey coworker, Kendal Price. The crux of the issue is that the payments were listed as “salary” rather than “commissions,” allegedly to avoid an appearance of a conflict of interest. All of those firms have appeared before the Supreme Court, the tribunal over which Mrs. Roberts’s husband presides.Mr. Price alleges that Mrs. Roberts’s compensation was a “stark anomaly” given her relative inexperience as a recruiter and that her “remarkable success” was due to her husband’s lofty position as the head of the entire federal judiciary. Mr. Price’s complaint contends that “litigants in U.S. courts, and especially the Supreme Court, deserve to know if their judges’ households are receiving six-figure payments from the law firms.”The Supreme Court said in a statement in 2023 that the chief justice was “attentive to ethical constraints” and had consulted an advisory opinion from 2009 that determined that a judge “need not recuse merely because” a spouse worked as a recruiter for a law firm with issues before the court.The D.C. bar’s hearing next month will not touch the merits of the complaint. The issue will be whether the guild’s Board on Professional Responsibility can review the Office of Disciplinary Counsel’s decision not to accept the initial complaint, or to investigate it at all. The Bar’s internal rule commands that such a decision is not reviewable, but the American Bar Association reckons that an avenue for appeals is generally warranted.While the ability of the board to review the disciplinary counsel’s decision not to hear the complaint is murky, another internal rule grants the body the authority to consider and investigate alleged grounds for discipline on its own motion, what is called sua sponte in legal parlance.The D.C. bar’s precedent maintains that holding federal office — like chief justice of the United States — does not grant immunity. Last summer the lawyers’ guild recommended that a former Department of Justice official, Jeffrey Clark, be disbarred for his role advising President Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Mr. Clark, an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Mr. Trump, was indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.After Mr. Trump’s reelection, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block Mr. Clark’s disbarment. Attorney General Todd Blanche, then serving in an acting capacity, declared that the “DC Bar has long acted as a blatantly partisan arm of leftist causes. No more.” The ultimate power to strip lawyers of their ability to practice law belongs to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which has not yet ruled on Mr. Clark’s case.While not every state mandates that judges be admitted to the bar, the District of Columbia commands that “a person may not be appointed a judge of a District of Columbia court unless that person … is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia.”That requirement applies only to state jurists. Federal judges — including justices of the Supreme Court — do not have that obligation and need not have a law license at all. “The last Justice to be appointed who did not attend any law school was James F. Byrnes. He did not graduate from high school and taught himself law, passing the bar at the age of 23,” the court notes. Justice Byrnes served on the court for a little over a year in 1941-1942. He went on to become America’s 49th secretary of state.The only constitutional requirements for the position of Chief Justice — like the associate justices — are nomination by the president and confirmation by the Senate. The parchment ordains that all federal judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” meaning that they are entitled serve for a lifetime appointment if they are not impeached. Ms. Roberts has a colorful familial history — overseas — in respect of the law. Her maternal grandfather was the longest-serving law clerk — for 61 years — in the history of Ireland. Her granduncle was a courier for the Irish Republican Army during the Troubles and a hunger striker in British prisons. He met his wife behind bars — she was teaching Gaeilge to prisoners.

D.C. Bar To Weigh Complaint Filed Against Chief Justice Roberts Over Millions Paid to His Wife for Law Firm Recruiting

D.C. Bar To Weigh Complaint Filed Against Chief Justice Roberts Over Millions Paid to His Wife for Law Firm Recruiting

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