Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff has urged public institutions that hosted the judge as a guest lecturer to purchase her memoir or children’s books, materials that she has earned at least $3.7 million for since becoming a justice in 2009.
More than 100 open records requests from The Associated Press to public institutions repeatedly show that Sotomayor’s taxpayer-funded staffers performed tasks for her book ventures, which workers in other federal branches are prohibited from doing. However, because the Supreme Court lacks a formal code of conduct, the Sotomayor is not restricted like other government officials.
“This is one of the most basic tenets of ethics laws that protects taxpayer dollars from misuse,” former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics and current Campaign Legal Center general counsel Kedric Payne told the wire service on Tuesday. “The problem at the Supreme Court is there’s no one there to say […]
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