The Banality of Judicial Corruption

The amount of judicial corruption we accept has reached almost comical levels. You may be thinking of Supreme Court Justices accepting expensive vacations or private flight. Or having their ward’s education and their mom’s home paid for by people with business in front of the court. Or having their aides getting Venmo’s money form lawyers who argued directly in front of the court. And yes, those are bad. But there are other, even more disturbing level of corruption that we seem to accept with hardly any mention.

Take the Microsoft Activision merger trial. The FTC sued Microsoft to prevent the merger and lost. The decision was terrible, ignoring the plain meaning of the law and artificially narrowing the bounds of the case to one game instead of the actual market. You can see this thread for a good walk-through of why the judge butchered the law. But what almost no stories mentioned was that the judge’s son works for Microsoft.

Think about that. A child of the judge involved in determining whether or not Microsoft would be a more powerful, richer company worked for Microsoft. Ann not only did the judge no recuse herself, not only do the ethical guidelines not require her to remove herself, hardly anyone mentioned this obvious conflict of interest.

We aren’t talking about a cousin’s son’s nephew’s third uncle’s sister-in-law’s second barber’s dog groomer here. This is the judge’s son, a direct family relationship. The idea that this is acceptable is insane. We cannot know that the judge was not influenced by the financial benefit to her son, knowingly or not. While her ruling is in line with the Robert Bork rewrite-anti-trust-law-as-we-see-fit regime, that is no guarantee of sincerity. Ironically, the same could be said of her decision had come out in favor of the FTC — how could Microsoft know that she didn’t overcompensate, consciously or not, to avoid the appearance of impropriety?

As a society we have been beaten down until we accept the unacceptable. Even the ideas that the appearance corruption should be avoided, that we should be able to trust our institutions, that the rich and powerful have a greater responsibility to remain above suspicion — they seem to have been tossed aside like so much garbage. A free society cannot exist in the face of massive corruption. And while the excesses of Alito and Thomas are bad, the corrosiveness of smaller acts like a judge ruling on a case with a direct financial implication for her family should not be understated.

It is the little cases, the gentle drip of everyday, uncommented upon corruption that wears down the bedrock of democratic society. if people don’t believe that the people who run the institutions are at least trying to be honest and fair, then why would they ever believe those institutions would be anything other than a millstone around their necks?