Jacobin - Billionaire-Backed Conservative Legal Groups Are Paying for Judges’ Luxury Vacations

Strategic councilor Caroline Fredrickson was also quoted in a Jacobin article about how the Federalist Society and George Mason University are both closely tied to the conservative legal movement and billionaire donors who have a financial interest in how the federal judiciary interprets laws.

“It confirms what we all knew intuitively: the Federalist Society and George Mason have a deep reach into the federal judiciary, and are using it to ensure that a very particular point of view about legal analysis is conveyed to judges,” she said. 

In 2021 and 2022, two conservative, billionaire-funded legal interests sent more than one hundred federal judges on 251 trips to conferences and seminars in cushy locations around the country and overseas, according to a Lever review of hundreds of federal financial disclosure forms.

In all, George Mason University (GMU) and the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers network, funded more than 40 percent of travel-related payments reported by federal judges in those years, far more than any other group.

The staggering number of junkets indicate that, as conservative Supreme Court justices face scrutiny for failing to disclose private luxury travel supplied by billionaire donors, right-wing legal interests funded by the megawealthy are routinely feting lower-court judges and treating them to all-expenses-paid trips to far-flung locales. As with the gifts to Supreme Court justices, the trips effectively function as a reward system for judges who espouse and maintain hard-line conservative legal views.

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