Some things don't improve over time.
Eleven years ago, I spoke with Stephen Gillers, then as now a law professor at New York University and one of the nation's top authorities on judicial ethics, for a news story about whether Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had crossed legal or ethical lines through her partisan activities and dark-money fundraising on issues that come before the court.
Gillers was measured. Ginni Thomas' constitutional rights as a private citizen allowed her to do her politicking, he said, though he did suggest that fair-minded Americans could question her husband's impartiality given her activism. It was striking, then, to see what Gillers says in a recent investigative piece about Thomas in the New Yorker. He calls her conduct "reprehensible."
