Law Firms Funneled Millions to Chief Justice John Roberts’ Wife. He Followed the Rules. That is the Scandal.
$10.3 Million, Zero Names: The Conservative Case for Fixing Judicial Ethics
Suppose a citizen, curious about the finances of the most powerful judge in America, had pulled Chief Justice John Roberts’s annual disclosure form at any point between 2007 and 2014. Here is the sum of what she would have learned about his wife’s career. Jane Roberts was employed by Major, Lindsey & Africa, described as attorney search consultants, and her income was of the type called salary. Our citizen would form a perfectly reasonable picture from those words, a respectable professional job in legal recruiting, the sort that pays perhaps $150,000 or $250,000 a year. She would close the file and think no more about it.
The picture would be wrong by an order of magnitude. Over those 8 years Mrs. Roberts collected $10,323,842.70 in commissions on $13.3 million in revenue attributed to her, figures drawn from her own firm’s internal spreadsheets, and by one sworn account she was the highest earning recruiter at the entire company by a wide margin. Now, a distinction is useful here, the distinction between a statement being true and a statement being informative. The form was true. The form was also, for any purpose the public might care about, empty. A disclosure regime under which an eight figure commission practice and a modest salaried job generate identical filings is not a disclosure regime in anything but name. That gap, between what the form says and what the money is doing, is the entire subject of this essay.
Let me say plainly what I am not arguing, because the argument fails if the reader mistakes it. I am not claiming the money was illegitimate. Recruiters who reviewed the figures for Business Insider called them plausible for someone with her network, and no wrongdoing by the Chief Justice or his wife has been established by anyone. Nor am I claiming Roberts violated any rule. So far as the record shows, he complied with every requirement the law placed on him. That concession is not a courtesy I extend before the real attack begins. The concession is the argument. A careful, honest, compliant man followed every rule, and the public learned essentially nothing. Whatever else that proves, it proves the rules cannot be doing their job.
Begin with who was actually paying. Legal recruiters are compensated by the law firms that hire their candidates, so the commissions originated with those firms and merely passed through Major Lindsey on their way to the Roberts household. The disclosure forms named only the employer, never the client firms writing the checks. We know the identity of exactly 4 placements, and only because they surfaced in litigation documents. Ken Salazar went to WilmerHale, Robert Bennett to Hogan Lovells, Neil MacBride to Davis Polk, and Michael Held to WilmerHale. WilmerHale and Hogan Lovells are among the heaviest repeat players before the Supreme Court, the firms whose partners argue there season after season. The full client list has never been made public, and under current law it never has to be.
Consider next how we came to know even that much, because the provenance of these facts is itself a lesson. In 2013 Major Lindsey fired a recruiter named Kendal Price. He sued the firm and Jane Roberts over his dismissal, and he lost. Nearly a decade later, in December 2022, he sent the litigation record, including Mrs. Roberts’s 2015 sworn testimony and the internal commission spreadsheets, to Congress and the Department of Justice. A skeptical reader will object that Price is a disgruntled former colleague with a failed lawsuit, and the skeptical reader is correct. But notice what follows from that objection. The only window the American public has ever had into the finances of the Chief Justice’s household is discovery material from somebody else’s employment dispute. Transparency by litigation accident is not transparency. If the disclosure system were functioning, Price would have had nothing to reveal, because the essentials would already have been on the forms.
There is also an admission in this story that nobody had to sue for. Mark Jungers, a former Major Lindsey managing partner, told Politico that the firm hired Mrs. Roberts because it hoped to benefit from her being married to the Chief Justice, observing that her network was his network and vice versa. He later assured Business Insider that he never saw her use the connection inappropriately, and of course he did. He is a recruiting executive protecting the industry’s most famous hire, and his denial is precisely what a denial would sound like whether or not it were true. The admission that matters is the first one. The market priced her marriage. Sophisticated law firms understood that hiring through the Chief Justice’s wife purchased something, and whether that something was influence or merely the appearance of access is beside the point, because federal ethics rules exist precisely to police the appearance. They captured none of it.
The pattern did not end in 2014. In 2019 Mrs. Roberts moved to the recruiting firm Macrae as a partner and acquired an ownership stake the value of which has never been disclosed. That stake appeared on none of the Chief Justice’s filings for 2019, 2020, or 2021. It surfaced on his 2022 report, filed in mid 2023, months after Price’s complaint reached Congress and weeks after the documents were published, accompanied by an explanation of inadvertence and amendments to the prior 3 years. I am content to take the Chief Justice entirely at his word about the inadvertence. Again, the disclosure rules do not require the justice to disclose the value of the equity stake. Two observations survive the concession. First, the correction followed exposure rather than internal review, and readers may weigh that sequence for themselves. Second, and more important, nothing would have happened either way. The civil penalty for false filings under 5 USC 13106 applies only to knowing and willful falsification, it requires the Judicial Conference to refer a judge to the Attorney General, and that referral mechanism has never once been invoked against a Supreme Court justice. In practice an amendment cures everything and nobody is ever penalized. A rule that has never been enforced against anyone in its class is not a rule. It is a suggestion wearing the costume of one.
Now assemble the pieces, because the force of the argument lies in the conjunction. The Ethics in Government Act requires a justice to disclose only the source, type, and dates of a spouse’s income, never the amount, so $10.3 million and $150,000 produce the same line on the same form. The client firms paying the commissions do not count as sources under the rules, only the employer does, so litigants before the Court may route seven figure payments into a justice’s household with no paper trail visible to the public. Mrs. Roberts’s earnings since 2014 are wholly unknown, she remains a Macrae partner today, and the payments have presumably continued for another decade about which we know literally nothing. The Judicial Conference’s Advisory Opinion 107, issued in 2009, blesses non recusal where a spouse recruits for firms appearing before the judge, and Roberts has apparently never recused himself because of his wife’s work. The Code of Conduct the Court adopted in November 2023 created no body to receive a complaint, conduct an investigation, or impose a sanction. Every sentence in this paragraph describes lawful conduct. Read together, they describe a machine for undetectable influence, and the hinge of the matter is materiality. A few hundred thousand dollars of spousal income is background noise that no serious person thinks could move a justice. Millions of dollars flowing from repeat Supreme Court litigants is material by any standard we apply to anyone else, to any lower court judge, any corporate director, any federal contractor. The Supreme Court is the one place in American public life where that distinction has been rendered invisible by design.
Conservatives should be the ones to repair this, and for reasons that are conservative to the core. The right spent 50 years building this Court, patiently, through the Federalist Society’s long argument for originalism and through institutions like the Heritage Foundation that defended judicial independence against court packing schemes and jurisdiction stripping fads. That Court’s authority is our inheritance to protect, and an unguarded gap in its ethics architecture is an invitation to people whose ambitions run well past reform. The fixes are modest and none of them touches judicial independence. Congress should require dollar ranges for spousal earned income, exactly as filers already report ranges for investments. It should require disclosure of any client whose payments to a justice’s spouse exceed some threshold, perhaps $50,000 in a year, whenever that client is a party or counsel before the Court. It should require automatic docket disclosure, not recusal, merely disclosure, in any case argued by a firm that paid the justice’s household above a materiality threshold in the prior 5 years. And it should give the ethics code an enforcement home, even one internal to the judiciary, so that a claim of inadvertence is reviewed by someone other than the man who signed the form. Disclosure rather than disqualification remains the default remedy throughout, and sunlight is the conservative answer to the left’s packing plans and disbarment stunts.
John Roberts has done almost nothing wrong, and that is the problem. The rules let the money in, kept the names out, kept the amounts secret, and asked nothing when the forms proved incomplete. A system that a careful man can satisfy while the public learns nothing is not an ethics regime. It
