Molly Redden is a senior politics reporter for HuffPost. Before joining HuffPost, she covered gender issues as a senior reporter for the Guardian US and was a staff writer for Mother Jones and the New Republic. She is based in New York. She can be reached at [email protected].
A secretive group is using large donations from Charles Koch's network to send conservative judges on lavish working vacations. From left: Koch, former Judge Thomas Lee, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and activist James Heilpern, who organizes the trips.
“In the beginning, we only had paper, hard copies. Remember those things called books?” the speaker, Josh Blackman, a prolific legal scholars on the right, said to the judges assembled in the wine cellar. “Computer technologies open an entire new world of research.” A new nonprofit called the Judicial Education Institute had picked up the tab. Since its incorporation in 2020, the Judicial Education Institute has raised roughly $1 million from Charles Koch’s network and Donors Trust, an anonymous rightwing funding network dubbedThe Institute’s chair, James Heilpern, is a graduate of Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, the intellectual birthplace of legal corpus linguistics and where he first became enthralled with its potential.
Multiple judges brought their family members. Judge L. Steven Grasz appears to have brought his daughter, she is posing in front of its White House-like exterior ― and McGlynn’s wife joined him in Deer Valley, he told HuffPost. In an email, Heilpern said the institute did not pay travel expenses for the judges’ guests.
Virtually every guest and speaker at these junkets was a member of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal network best known for hand-selecting former President Donald Trump’s judicial nominations. And nearly every judge who attended was a Trump appointee — including some of his most controversial.
Under the guises of originalism and textualism, which both present as ways to interpret the law based on its “original public meaning,” right wing judges have handed down a series of increasingly unpopular rulings, eviscerating gun laws, abortion rights, and prohibitions on prayer in public schools. Part of Mizelle’s justification was that “sanitation” — a key word in the 1944 law that gives the CDC its authority to make public health rules — historically described the act of making something clean. “Wearing a mask cleans nothing,” Mizelle wrote.
Lee, who doesn’t have a formal position with the Judicial Education Institute but is a fixture at their retreats, is the person most responsible for corpus linguistics taking off in the courts. Starting in 2011, as a judge on the Utah Supreme Court, Lee used corpus linguistics in a steady drip of rulings, and the practice slowly trickled out to other judges and lawyers at the state level.
In 2022, in Kennedy v. Bremerton, a case on whether a high school football coach had a right to hold public prayers on the field after football games, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of the coach, citing “history and traditions.” The majority opinion, by Justice Neil Gorsuch, pivoted off a lower court dissent by Judge Ryan D.
“I have worked hard at each stage of the organization’s development to ensure that I have followed all relevant judicial ethics canons,” he wrote in an email. “The training JEI provides is among the best training I have ever received as a judge in terms of rigor, information, fairness and ideological neutrality. And I believe corpus linguistics will, in the near future, be an important tool in the toolkit we judges use to interpret legal texts.
Linguists train for years to perform unbiased searches and constantly reevaluate the correct way to interpret the results. Mark Davies, a retired Brigham Young University linguist,in 2022 he was troubled by the idea of “naive judges … spending their lunch hour doing quick-and-dirty searches of corpora.”The search for a law’s “original public meaning” invokes the idea of one, singular public, when different groups of people have diverging interpretations of the law, Bernstein said.
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