More Hunting

I'll let this speak for itself:

THE NATION
Scalia Took Trip Set Up by Lawyer in Two Cases
Kansas visit in 2001 came within weeks of the Supreme Court hearing arguments.

By Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the guest of a Kansas law school two years ago and went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the school's dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases in which the dean was a lead attorney.

The cases involved issues of public policy important to Kansas officials. Accompanying Scalia on the November 2001 hunting trip were the Kansas governor and the recently retired state Senate president, who flew with Scalia to the hunting camp aboard a state plane.

Two weeks before the trip, University of Kansas School of Law Dean Stephen R. McAllister, along with the state's attorney general, had appeared before the Supreme Court to defend a Kansas law to confine sex offenders after they complete their prison terms.

Two weeks after the trip, the dean was before the high court to lead the state's defense of a Kansas prison program for treating sex criminals.

Scalia was hosted by McAllister, who also served as Kansas state solicitor, when he visited the law school to speak to students. At Scalia's request, McAllister arranged for the justice to go pheasant hunting after the law school event. And the dean enlisted then-Gov. Bill Graves and former state Senate President Dick Bond, both Republicans, to go as well.

Scalia later sided with Kansas in both cases.

In a written statement, Scalia said: "I do not think that spending time at a law school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the governor of a state that had matters before the court."

"When a case is on the docket before a judge, the coziness of meeting privately with a lawyer is questionable," said Chicago lawyer Robert P. Cummins, who headed an Illinois board on judicial ethics. "It would seem the better part of judgment to avoid those situations."

Added Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra University: "A reasonable person might question this, and that's the problem." He said Scalia "should have rescheduled the trip until after" the cases were over.

Other experts noted, however, that no one who met Scalia in Kansas was a named litigant in the two cases, in contrast to the trip with Cheney, who is the appealing party in the upcoming energy task force case.

Scalia said that if Supreme Court justices were prohibited from taking such a trip, then they "would be permanently barred from social contact with all governors, since at any given point in time virtually all states have matters pending before us."

Scalia said he accepted an invitation to the law school "sometime before October 2000."

"I had worked for a couple of years on getting him to come here. And he asked whether there was any good hunting," McAllister said. "He said he had hunted turkey and deer, but not pheasant, so that was appealing."

In the spring of 2001, the high court voted to hear both Kansas cases, and they were set for argument that fall. McAllister said he called to alert Scalia that he would be arguing the two Kansas cases before the court at about the same time as the justice's scheduled trip.

McAllister said Scalia responded that he would come as scheduled, and that he would not accept a speaking fee and would pay for his own hunting.

On Oct. 30, 2001, two weeks before the trip, McAllister and state Atty. Gen. Carla Stovall appeared before Scalia and the other Supreme Court justices in the case of Kansas vs. Crane.

After Scalia returned to Lawrence, McAllister said, the dean and others associated with the law school took the justice to dinner.

Two weeks after hosting Scalia, the law school dean was back in Washington to argue on behalf of Kansas in a case called McKune vs. Lile. That case tested whether Kansas could force sex offenders to confess all their past sex crimes as part of prison treatment.



- posted by Joshua @ 10:04 AM