When judicial education is no holiday

By Mark Tapscott

Numerous tax-exempt foundations and academic organizations routinely host educational and training events for judges and lawyers. George Mason University's Law and Economics Center, for example, has hosted more than 4,000 federal judges in educational seminars since 1976.

But unlike the Institute for Law and Economic Policy's devotion to the plaintiffs' side of class action law suits, Mason's seminars cover a broad range of topics and issues, require 500-700 pages of readings, include up to 21 hours of lectures spread over five days and are held at affordable locales.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has attended two Mason events, described them as "far more intense than the Florida sun."

Mason insists on its web site that it maintains a solid wall between corporate donors and the law school professors who run its seminars, saying "when we discovered that a corporate donor had asserted in 1999 that they viewed us as key allies, we returned its contribution (about 0.003 of our support)."

The American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution jointly conduct monthly judicial training seminars, while other less frequent events are hosted by such disparate groups as the American College of Bankruptcy, the American College of Trial Lawyers, Diversity Concepts Legal Networking Conference, the Opperman Institute of Judicial Administration, the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, the International Judicial Academy, New York University School of Law, the Aspen Institute and the Sedona Conference.

The funding sources for all of these groups are listed on the Privately Funded Seminars Disclosure System (PFSDS) administrated by the Judicial Conference of the U.S. Courts for events beginning in January 2007.

The PFSDS was established in 2006 in response to critics who argued that private and special interests should not be allowed to influence federal judges surreptitiously by funding educational and training seminars that could affect the outcome of litigation.

No information was found on PSFDS for either of the two conferences hosted by ILEP in 2007, although this could because both were scheduled before the system's deadline. --- M.T.

Mark Tapscott is the editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.

When judicial education is no holiday

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