Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ billionaire gift far exceeds the level of bribery that has sparked calls for US justice reform abroad for decades.
Applying the blueprint for U.S. judicial reform, which academics show will help the nation prosper and democratize, to its own high courts could clean up the mess.
Since April, news accounts have revealed that Thomas has received nearly $2 million from real estate mogul Harlan Crowe. Gifts included a $500,000 trip to Indonesia, a $500,000 donation to his wife’s Liberty Consulting firm (which paid her a $120,000 salary), and a $20,000 gift to Crow’s Topridge Resort. Includes $2,250 per night trip for the year, five trips in Crow’s private, totaling $350,000. Jets ($70,000 each), $150,000 for Thomas’ nephew’s tuition, and $93,000 for an above-market house. This does not include an extended cruise in New Zealand (which was not quoted) or payments from conservative justice activist Leonard Leo to Clarence Thomas’ wife for consulting services, which she named. are excluded from the billing documents.
The monetary value of these undeclared gifts exceeds bribes given to judges in other countries. Due to the confidentiality requirements in corruption cases, data on judge bribery are obviously difficult to obtain. Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, however, was an exception, and in the 1990s a corrupt conspiracy with secret police chief Vladimiro Montesinos led to a startling conspiracy involving Montesinos demanding written receipts for bribes and videotaping illicit negotiations. Documented by conduct. There, a Supreme Court justice was offered $10,000 a month in bribes, along with medical care, to help the election. Even with the eye surgery promised to the judge, the amount pales in comparison to what Thomas received as an undeclared gift. And it is compared to the bribes offered to corrupt judges in Peru under the most impudent dictatorships of our time. (To be precise, Peru had the sixth worst record for state embezzlement, behind Indonesia’s Suharto, Philippines’ Marcos, Zaire’s Mobutu, Nigeria’s Abacha and Serbia’s Milosevic).
This massive corruption scandal in the United States is ironic for a country that has spent decades financially supporting judicial reforms abroad. In my work, I have built a global database of her 4,568 judicial reform cases implemented by 500 foreign aid agencies since 1996. Since 1996, he found that $5.4 billion has been spent on these reforms. The largest donors are her USAID, the United States Foreign Aid Agency, and the World Bank, where the United States has the largest voting stake. These judicial reforms are aimed at improving the quality, speed and access of the court system and usually include anti-corruption elements such as integrity training and monitoring of judges and court officials.
The premise of these measures is that the rule of law is a key prerequisite for prosperity and the fight against corruption. In fact, using rigorous statistical analysis, we find that these reforms have had a large positive effect on the economy and on reducing government corruption. Roughly, there is a 22% increase in economic efficiency and a 10% increase in society’s expectations that government will follow courts and laws. In other words, the rule of law is both a pillar of economic growth and a restraint of power.
I am working on one of Kenya’s judicial reforms, a measure funded by the World Bank in the amount of $120 million. The World Bank and the Kenyan judiciary have developed a systematic data collection effort within the courts to understand the inner workings of the courts, measure performance and identify problems. Additional data is being collected among court users to expose corruption scandals. Using these data, we have developed algorithms that can detect problems in courtrooms and monitor judges. This has a strong positive effect, as shown in ongoing randomized controlled trials. The World Bank and Kenya’s judiciary are thus pushing a new era of data access, transparency and scientific experimentation into courts.
These same standards are not applied in the United States. The latest rules for Supreme Court justices, secretly passed in March this year, allow gifts of a personal nature to be accepted without disclosure (within certain limits). Thus, the Supreme Court is moving in the opposite direction of the Kenyan judiciary: incomplete data, less transparency, and more opacity. In this regard, while Clarence Thomas’ paid leave may be obvious (not for other purposes, such as private jets, tuition, or donating to his wife), the problem runs deeper.
Transparency and corruption have serious consequences. My research has already shown that the lack of foreign judicial reform, as advocated by the United States, is having a negative impact on the economy and elite corruption. At a more conceptual level, the fundamental purpose of a fair legal system is to level the playing field. The rules are the same for everyone, no one is above the law, and everyone has a chance to thrive. When the legal system is biased toward the wealthy, it tilts the playing field in favor of the wealthy and deprives the rest of the population of incentives to innovate and grow. Inequality grows in a vicious circle that leads to greater tyranny of the richest. This is the problem here. The United States should look in the mirror and implement the judicial reforms it has advocated abroad in its domestic high courts.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. Scientific American.
