A bill introduced this summer called the High Court Gift Ban Act would tackle the problem of gift acceptance in the third-branch in a simple, discrete way. (Big thanks to Reps. Raskin and Ocasio-Cortez for leading, and we’re pleased 55 additional House members have signed on as cosponsors.)

We want to break down the text since, like all legislation, you might have some questions after a first read-through:

An overall highlight is that the bill applies to “judicial officers,” meaning all Supreme Court justices as well as all 2,300 or so lower-court (circuit, district, bankruptcy, magistrate) judges.

Section 2(a)(1) lays out the prohibition: no gifts greater than $50 and no aggregate value of gifts greater than $100 from a single source. This is consistent with what the law is for members of the House and Senate.

Would $0 be better? Maybe yes; maybe no. The key here is syncing up judicial gift rules with congressional gift rules, and with a $50 limit, you won’t have a judge being in violation of the law if they pick up a pen and pocket Constitution at an ABA event or have the person in front of them in line buy them a coffee.

Section 2(a)(2) describes the exceptions, which line up with the exceptions for members of Congress (e.g., gifts from relatives or other judges) but seek to ensure that when, say, Yale Law gives Justice Thomas, Alito or Sotomayor a medal, Yale Law itself is paying for the medal and not a partisan organization using Yale as a passthrough.

Section 2(a)(2)(G) says judges attending privately funded seminars are not accepting gifts, per se, but there needs to be greater oversight over judicial junkets. 

The bill does that by requiring judges and justices who wish to attend a seminar for which the total reimbursement (transportation, lodging, meals and entertainment) is greater than $2,000 to get sign off from their chief judge or the Chief Justice.

This provision was included in large part to reporting this year by Fox News and NPR on lavish, and often unreported, junkets taken by lower-court judges, though the idea of requiring greater disclosure of judicial travel goes back years (e.g., here’s Rep. Issa on this at a 2016 hearing).

Section 2(a)(2)(H) reduces the personal hospitality exemption that judges and justices can avail themselves of, limiting it to an amount equal to when the gift tax kicks in ($18,000 in 2024).

So once $18,000 in personal hospitality is reached, you need to pay your host for “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality.” (Transportation and gifts of lodging at resorts owned by corporations are still not personal hospitality, per p. 6 of the existing regs.)

In the definitions section, the bill makes it clear that for something to count as personal hospitality, the host has to be on the premises (cf., these disclosures, where judges stayed at their friends’ houses but still reported them as gifts since their friends appeared to have not been there).

Section 2(b) lays out enforcement of the bill, or what happens when a judicial officer accepts a gift, junket or personal hospitality they shouldn’t, namely a referral to the Attorney General for investigation.

For lower court judges, the Judicial Conference would make that referral, as they would when lower-court judges and justices violate the financial disclosures law.

For justices, that referral would be made by an internal SCOTUS ethics officer, a position envisioned by three other recent ethics proposals, by the Court’s Office of Legal Counsel, or perhaps by the Chief Justice himself.

Section 2(b)(2) describes the civil and criminal penalties for noncompliance with the gifts law, which are the same as the civil and criminal penalties for noncompliance with the disclosures law.

Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth said: “In response to this bill, Supreme Court justices and lower court judges might say, ‘We already have gift rules,’ which may technically be true, but given the jet-sized loopholes in the existing laws and regulations, aren’t they more like ‘gift suggestions’?

This bill fixes that by banning the acceptance of gifts by judicial officers, significantly narrowing the personal hospitality exemption and sending a clear message: all government officials, no matter which branch they serve in, must follow the highest of ethical standards.”