The Scoop

Adam Liptak and Janet Roberts of the New York Times used Ohio campaign finance data and state Supreme Court records from Lexis-Nexis to show that “justices routinely sat on cases after receiving campaign contributions from the parties involved or from groups that filed supporting briefs. On average, they voted in favor of contributors 70 percent of the time.” The paper’s analysis, which covered contributions since 1994 and examined cases that did not garner an unanimous verdict, found that “in the 12 years that were studied, the justices almost never disqualified themselves from hearing their contributors’ cases. In the 215 cases with the most direct potential conflicts of interest, justices recused themselves just 9 times.” A lengthy methodology is also available.