Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson, Part One: Class Action Givers

Last week the Judicial Crisis Network began running advertisements on Arkansas television informing the public about Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson. This is the first part in a series of posts in which Carrie Severino and I will discuss Goodson’s tenure as a judge and analyze several of her most important judicial opinions. Today’s post is about gifts. Lots of gifts.

Goodson was first elected to the bench in 2008 as Judge Courtney Henry, when she won a seat on the Arkansas Court of Appeals. Two years later, with the help of Bill Clinton (who helped raise money for the race), she won a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Around the same time, her then-husband filed for divorce and she began receiving sizeable personal gifts from a powerful Arkansas class-action lawyer named John Goodson. In 2010 alone, according to mandatory financial disclosures, John Goodson gave Judge/Justice Henry gifts totaling just under $100,000, including a $22,500 watch and a $6,700 coat. (For comparison, judges on the state’s courts of appeals receive an annual judicial salary of just over $161,000, and the median household income in Arkansas is around $40,000.) In 2011 she married Goodson and adopted his last name. Her disclosure forms from that year include a $12,000 Caribbean cruise paid for by Arkansas attorney W.H. Taylor, who also gave her a $50,000 trip to Italy the next year.

Apart from showering her with gifts, class action lawyers have contributed generously to her campaigns. According to a recent investigation by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, during her 2010 campaign she received $142,500 in campaign contributions from a group of six class-action law firms, including John Goodson’s. The Democrat-Gazette’s investigation was unable to identify a single case that clients of John Goodson’s firm and its co-counsel had lost before the Arkansas Supreme Court since at least mid-2008.

With this background, it’s no surprise that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recently called Goodson “the ultimate insider with connections that run throughout the state’s legal, economic and political establishment.”