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Exclusive: Justice Jackson Amends Ten Financial Disclosure Reports

This post has been updated with new information.

A year and a half after Fix the Court exclusively reported that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had omitted two trips, a teaching gig, several board positions, information on her daughters’ college funds and some spousal income from her financial disclosure reports, those disclosures have been amended and posted in the judiciary’s online database (screencap below).

Justice Jackson filed the 10 amendments on July 11, 2023, yet the 2022 amendment was only posted this January, the 2021 amendment was posted in February, and the other eight (2013-2020) appear to have been posted within the last week or two.

4/2 update: The Financial Disclosure Committee at its January 2024 meeting, we’re told, advanced a proposal that would permit the posting of any amendments to judges’ and justices’ disclosures from 2021 and earlier if those amendments were filed in 2022 or later. The Judicial Conference approved that proposal on March 12, hence the mid-March uploading of Jackson’s pre-2021 disclosures.

In terms of the contents, there are almost no surprises; Jackson added the very information she indicated on her SCOTUS nominee disclosure that she had omitted over the years (she became a district judge in 2013, a circuit judge in 2021 and a justice in 2022).

There are two changes of note not included in the above “additional information”:

Jackson added a 2017 gift valued at $3,000 from the University of Georgia Law School in concert with her delivering the annual Edith House Lecture. It’s unclear if this was a physical gift or honorarium or was the cost of the reception that followed her speech. We’ve asked UGA Law and will report back.

Jackson removed a 2019 seminar sponsored by the Federal Judicial Center from her reimbursements section, since trips paid for by the judiciary for training need not be included in disclosures.

Also of note is that Jackson goes back further than necessary, as under the Ethics in Government Act, the judiciary only holds on to six years of disclosures at a given time.

In Justice Thomas’ 2022 disclosure, where he listed his 2014 house sale to Harlan Crow, Thomas referred to that year as “outside the covered period” (p. 8), since that sale occurred nearly nine years before the disclosure in question was filed.

Thomas, of course, still has not accounted for most of his free trips on his disclosures, which by and large do not wholly count as “personal hospitality,” given that a private jet or yacht do not count as “facilities” under the reporting exemption.

The original Jackson disclosures can be downloaded from Free Law Project’s site.

The amendments are here: 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013

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