The search for conflicts of interest in the personal lives of the Supreme Court justices has reached a new level of paranoia with the suggestion that Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, somehow shouldn’t be allowed to do her job as a legal recruiter.
The suggestion seems to have arisen from a letter to Congress from one of Sullivan Roberts’s former colleagues, a man who was fired from the recruiting firm and sued over his dismissal. Rather than dismissing him as a disgruntled ex-employee, the New York Times amplified his concerns and quoted Richard Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, as saying the letter raised “troubling issues that once again demonstrate the need” for ethics reforms at the Supreme Court.
But this would be the wrong fight for liberals to pick. As it happens, Mrs. Roberts has showed exemplary concern about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. She switched careers from being a law firm partner to being a recruiter after her husband became chief justice, a move that must be viewed as a sacrifice in a sexist world where women still comprise less than a quarter of major law-firm partners.
