June 9, 2007
Who's the richest Supreme Court Justice?
Hint: He's also the one who is least likely to take advantage of offers to travel somewhere to teach or give a speech, which is to say he never does.
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I found it interesting that they didn't give any useful info about Ginsberg. cause she was a woman? a liberal? well off? a spouse?
she didn't file?
I'm surprised they're not (on average) wealthier. Assets of between $1 and $6 million? Nowadays that hardly registers on the true wealth scale.
ricpic...
not including homes. for most of them that means a DC place and somewhere else, either a previous home or a vacation one.
given the prices of beltway real estate, that adds another million to everybodies totals
A bank merger made Souter one of the wealthiest. He listed bank holdings and stocks worth between $5.2 million and $25.5 million in 2003, compared to between $1 million and $5.4 million in 2002.
Ginsburg, in years past the wealthiest justice by far, had assets including real estate trusts worth between $5.6 million and $23.4 million. Breyer showed investments and holdings worth between more than $4 million and about $15 million.
Reporting is complicated by the Ginsburg's financial structure. Complicated and unsurprisingly so since she is married to internationally prominant tax law attorney Martin Ginsburg.
Much of Martin Ginsburg's wealth generation goes into special blind family and foundation trusts that avoid his spouse having to know about and do recusal on. Trusts that may legally one day involve Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a beneficiary - but for now are financially removed from her reporting requirements.
(Much as other noted family blind trusts shelter wealth and keep that wealth "hands off" from personal tax reporting, gov't position disclosure reporting requirements - for the Kennedys, Bronfmans, Soros, Bass Families and many, many others of lesser wealth like the Ginsburgs but who use similar financial structure.)
Souter, being single and childless, has his wealth in his name..and does not use family trust and foundation structures...
My bet is with Martin still raking in 3-5 million a year from his corporate law firm partnership as he has for decades, all the sheltered investment assets, royalties from many of his books still being standard texts for tax attorneys - that the Ginsburgs still are on top.
I dunno, ricpic. I'd call a millionaire wealthy. Not necessarily one of the financial movers of society like billionaires are, but certainly wealthy by most standards (for people over 55, the average net worth is $250,000, so they are wealthier than most of their peers); though for people under 35, the average net worth has declined (as per a story in the USA Today last week which profiled the changes in net wealth) so in the future it is possible that the Supreme Court Justices may be relatively more wealthy than they are today.
The misstatement near the top of the article "At least six of the nine justices report investment income [emphasis added] of more than $1 million" made me drop my false teeth in the morning coffee. There's of course a huge difference between assets of $1 million and income of $1 million, and it's clear from the rest of the article that it's referring to the former. Any accounting major wouldn't have made such a basic mistake. Another instance of sloppy editing at CNN.
yeah, like a factor of 10
Actually, I've sometimes thought that we should double or triple judicial salaries and then ban them from giving speeches for money.
We've seen for years how money corrupts Congress and members of the executive branch; even when everything is technically legal (of course look who wrote the law), it is hard to go against the direct interest of someone who (even legally) just handed you a big check or bought you a vacation (in effect a speech is both, with the technical veneer that you might have done more than pull up the last speech, make some small edits to fit the new venue and then run it off.)
What about paying Supreme Court Justices, say, $2 million per year (with a COLA) and then strictly bar them from accepting any other money from any source?
Eli- you're aware that there's a reason why the U.S. reports are littered with the words "Justice X took no part in the consideration or decision of this case," right?
The richest justice is Souter, but C-fudd is neurotically, compulsively obsessed with Ginsburg. Gee, I woner why that is?
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