FLP's Written Testimony on Financial Disclosures for the House Committee on the Judiciary

A lot has happened since we launched our database of financial disclosures last month.

Senator Warren and Representative Jayapal wrote a letter to Chief Justice Roberts. The Director of the judicial branch wrote a letter to all judges about how to better avoid conflicts. Disclosures briefly showed up on SCOTUS's website. And tomorrow at 2pm ET, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to discuss this issue.

We have been proud to play our role in this process. Today we are sharing written testimony that we have submitted in advance of tomorrow's hearing.

In our testimony, we explain our experience building our database of financial disclosures. What we did, what motivated it, and the impediments that made it so difficult.

We make six recommendations:

1. Ban all magistrate judges, bankruptcy judges, and Article III judges and justices from making or holding investments in individual stocks.

2. Rapidly place all judicial financial disclosures online.

3. Make disclosures available in machine-readable formats.

4. Nomination disclosures should be available from the Financial Disclosure Office before nomination hearings.

5. Repeal statutes requiring the destruction of financial disclosure reports.

6. Consider passing a public access law for the judiciary.

I encourage you to read the details and I believe that if these reforms are made, we will have a stronger, more transparent, and more trustworthy judiciary.