Chief justice: Judges must better avoid financial conflicts

By JESSICA GRESKO
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says the federal judiciary needs to do more to ensure judges don’t participate in cases where they have financial conflicts of interest. Roberts made the comments as part of his annual report on the federal judiciary released Friday evening. Roberts pointed to a series of stories recently in The Wall Street Journal that found that “between 2010 and 2018, 131 federal judges participated in a total of 685 matters involving companies in which they or their families owned shares of stock.” Roberts says, “We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards, and those judges violated an ethics rule.”