Litigation

After Gulf Spill, New Attention to Recusal

By Peter Hardin

It’s not every day that judicial recusal gets a lot of attention. But that has changed with a swirl of questions raised over the interests of judges in a position to rule on the Obama administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Alliance for Justice advocacy group has issued a report spotlighting the past work affiliations and recent investments of judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, entitled “Judicial Gusher: The Fifth Circuit’s Ties to Oil.”

Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, said her group was “alarmed by clear evidence that many judges in the Fifth Circuit are marinating in a pervasive oil culture, raising legitimate questions about potential bias, but also threatening to do great damage to the public’s perception of the courts as a haven of fair and impartial justice,” according to a National Law Journal article.

Aron contended that most of the circuit bench’s judges should recuse themselves from the drilling ban case, Mother Jones reported. “Given the significance of this case and the national attention it is receiving, it is important for judges to appear as fair and impartial as possible.”

According to the AFJ report, two members of a three-judge panel that heard arguments in the case this week had represented the oil and gas industries regularly while working in the private sector, and the third had reported significant holdings in energy industry companies, valued between $15,000 and $300,000.

The AFJ report even caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog.

On Thursday, the panel of the 5th Circuit rejected the federal government’s arguments for enforcing the moratorium, according to a New York Times article.

You can learn about the holdings of numerous judges in the region, including many with financial ties to oil, gas and linked energy industries, from an earlier Gavel Grab post.

Full post as published by The Gavel on July 09, 2010 (boomark / email).