How Scalia Law School Became a Key Friend of the Court

By regulation, justices might earn outdoors revenue from a restricted variety of sources: ebook advances and royalties, investments, and educating. The judicial code of conduct particularly encourages educating. Many justices have augmented their authorities salaries, which now hover beneath $300,000, by holding lessons at colleges together with Harvard, Duke and Notre Dame.

But Scalia Law rapidly moved to the entrance of the road, partially by providing beneficiant advantages. For educating summer time programs that usually ran for as much as two weeks, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh every made salaries that approached the authorized cap on sure outdoors revenue, roughly $30,000 lately.

The college additionally creates bespoke packages for the justices in far-flung places. Justice Gorsuch has traveled to Iceland and Italy to show; Justice Kavanaugh has taught in Britain. During the primary pandemic summer time, each justices pressed on with their lessons, educating at stateside resorts. (Only Justice Thomas has routinely held his lessons on campus, with two of his former clerks as co-professors).

“When a justice is with us, we do everything we can to engage the justice with our students,” the regulation college’s dean, Ken Randall, stated in an announcement. He added, “Law schools serve students, and their education is undoubtedly enhanced by the justices teaching or visiting or speaking with students.”

At occasions, the justices’ educating has intersected with their positions on the court docket.

Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas recurrently used staff of their chambers to coordinate their outdoors tutorial duties, regardless of a judicial advisory opinion — which the justices say they voluntarily observe — that employees members mustn’t assist “in performing activities for which extra compensation is to be received.”