2006—The New York Times reports that Michigan federal district judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who issued a wild ruling the previous week declaring that the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program is unconstitutional (see This Week for August 17, 2006), is a trustee and officer of a group that has given at least $125,000 to the Michigan ACLU, the plaintiff in the NSA case. Just as the supposed legal ethicists on the Left recklessly fling flimsy ethics charges against judicial conservatives, they race to dismiss more substantial charges against liberal judicial activists.

Consider, for example, law professor Stephen Gillers’s breezy assertion that “the fact that [Judge Taylor] sits on the board of a group that gives money to the plaintiff for an otherwise unrelated endeavor would not in my mind raise reasonable questions about her partiality on the issue of warrantless wiretapping.”  This is the same Gillers who, in the midst of Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation process, offered the badly flawed opinion that Roberts, as a D.C. Circuit judge, should have recused himself from the Hamdan case because “the public can never know” how the prospect of a Supreme Court nomination might have affected his thinking. The same Gillers who recklessly opined that Justice Scalia’s participation in a legal seminar sponsored by a group that does not litigate raised serious ethical concerns. The same Gillers who, in advice that other ethics gurus questioned, advised Justice Breyer that Breyer could take part in a case presenting the question whether the sentencing guidelines are constitutional, notwithstanding Breyer’s own extensive involvement in creating the guidelines. Anyone notice a pattern?