For 2302: An NYT story highlighted in the Atlantic regarding extrajudicial activity and whether it might undermine the impartiality (or the appearance of it) of the courts:
Jeff Shesol on an Excess of Extrajudicial Activity: Jeff Shesol observes that all nine Supreme Court justices have been "giving speeches, signing books, leading workshops, posing for pictures at charity functions" lately and asks, "is there something wrong with extrajudicial activity?" Shesol, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, acknowledges in today's New York Times that "surely there is nothing new or unnatural about justices holding political views and seeking the company of others who share them," but, for example, "there are few, if any, precedents for the involvement of Justices Thomas and Scalia with the fund-raising efforts of the Koch brothers." Justice Alito has associated himself with conservative magazine The American Spectator, just as "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has taken part in the Aspen Institute seminars, which receive some financing from George Soros... [and] Justice Stephen Breyer has turned up at Renaissance Weekend, the conclave that the Clintons put on the map in the 1990s." The problem with these extrajudicial activities, Shesol explains, is that "the public's faith in the rule of law depends, to no small degree, on the idea that judges try, as best they can, to maintain a judicial temperament--that they keep a certain distance from public and even private events that appear, in the truest sense of the word, partisan, and that they maintain an open mind. Not a blank mind, devoid of a judicial philosophy, but an open mind — a certain receptiveness to reason, argument and fact."
