This post is from an article by Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times.
In 2013, Time Warner, the large media company, filed a brief urging the United States Supreme Court to rule against the online company Aereo, which was redistributing broadcast channels over the Internet. The so-called amicus, or friend of the court, brief was filed to support ABC, a unit of Disney, which had brought a copyright violation case against Aereo on behalf of the broadcasters.
Last year, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted against Aereo with a majority of the other justices in what became a 6-to-3 decision that effectively shut the company down. What was not known at the time was that the chief justice was a shareholder of Time Warner. According to a disclosure form released earlier this month, Justice Roberts owned as much as $500,000 of Time Warner stock.
It wasn’t the only time Justice Roberts ruled on a case in which an amicus brief was filed by a company in which he owned a stake. According to his disclosure forms, he also owned shares in Hewlett- Packard, up to $50,000 worth, when he ruled in a patent case in favor of Teva Pharmaceutical; Hewlett-Packard had filed an amicus brief in support of Teva. EMC, a major Internet technology firm, also filed an amicus brief to support Teva; Justice Stephen G. Breyer owned up to $100,000 worth of shares in EMC, according to disclosure forms.
At a time when the public has increasingly lost faith in Washington and our judicial system, rulings by justices with a potential financial interest in the outcome of the cases raise new questions about the credibility of the court.
A nonprofit organization called Fix the Court, which is pushing to have Supreme Court justices put their holdings in a blind trust, has tracked the relationship between the justices’ votes and their financial stakes in companies that have filed amicus briefs.
CLICK HERE for Fix the Court's website.
CLICK HERE to read Andrew's article.
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