It may not reach the level of Clarence Thomas being buddies with a guy who owns a garden full of dictator statues, but there are plenty of other scandals to be had on the Supreme Court. Politico reported this week that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has found himself in a small ethics conundrum—one tied to the oil and gas industry.
In 2017, a 40-acre property co-owned by Gorsuch and two other parties under an LLC was up for sale in Colorado. Brian Duffy, the CEO of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s largest law firms, bought it for $1.825 million.
A house sale is an innocuous enough occurrence, but the timing makes it a little suspicious: the house went under contract just nine days after the Senate voted to approve Gorsuch in 2017. The house had been on the market since 2015, and the price had been lowered several times from its initial listing of $2.495 million, Politico reported, which suggests they were struggling to sell.
Gorsuch has, in the past, been meticulous about disclosing even the smallest of gifts he’s gotten: he’s listed a $500 fishing rod, a $1,000 watercolor painting, and $699 cowboy boots on disclosure forms, all included with the names of the people who gifted them to him.
But Gorsuch seemed to have forgotten to disclose the identity of the buyer in the disclosure forms on the house sale, leaving that section of the form blank. According to the details Gorsuch did disclose about the sale, he banked between $250,001 and $500,000, per his disclosure forms.
Greenberg Traurig is a huge firm and brings cases of all kinds to higher courts. Of the 12 cases Politico tracked where Gorsuch weighed in on a case involving Greenberg Traurig lawyers, he sided with lawyers from the firm eight times. (This is almost certainly an undercount, since not all votes the court makes are public.)
But one of the cases where he did side with Greenberg Traurig was a momentous one for the planet. Last year, the court ruled in the case of West Virginia vs. EPA that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan went too far in attempting to regulate emissions from power plants, throwing a wrench into the future effectiveness of any similar plans. In that suit, a Greenberg Traurig lawyer represented North Dakota, one of the several states that brought the suit; a shareholder of the firm is also a Special Assistant to the state’s attorney general and was also part of the lawsuit. (In August, less than two months after helping polluters win against the EPA, Greenberg Traurig announced that it had been recognized by the EPA for its “green power” use. “We are proud to join this partnership with the EPA which will serve as an expansion of our efforts to protect and preserve the environment,” Duffy said in a statement. You can’t make this up.)
Duffy told Politico that he’d never met Gorsuch socially and had never argued cases before him, and that he’d gotten the approval of the firm’s ethics department to buy the property. We reached out to Greenberg Traurig for comment and will update this story if we hear back.
Even if Gorsuch’s behavior is sketchy as hell here, according to the rules of the court, it’s all above board. As Susan Rinkunas at Jezebel pointed out, Supreme Court justices are not beholden to the same code of ethics that other federal judges have to follow, and they can basically choose whether or not to recuse themselves from specific cases.
In a final twist of the knife for the planet, another party that stood to benefit from the sale of the Colorado house were buddies of Gorsuch from his ties to an oil and gas billionaire. The two co-owners of the Colorado property were men whom Gorsuch met through Philip Anschutz, Colorado’s richest person who got his start in the oil and gas industry. Anschutz retained Gorsuch as counsel for his companies for various cases in the early 2000s, and helped Gorsuch get a seat on the Denver federal appeals court.
As the New York Times reported in 2017, Gorsuch was “a semiregular speaker at the mogul’s annual dove-hunting retreats for the wealthy.” Wonder if those are still on now that he’s got his lifetime appointment.
