Via comments at “Oh, That Liberal Media” comes a link to an interesting post about another potentially controversial event attended by Justice Ginsburg.

The commenter, Gary Imhoff, says:

On April 15, 2003, while the Michigan affirmative action cases were pending before her court, Justice Ginsburg attended an event honoring Lee Bollinger, the former Dean of the U. of Mich. Law School who had just been named president of Columbia University, at which Bollinger made a speech essentially laying out his case.

According to the post’s author, Justice Ginsburg had a front-row seat for Bollinger’s talk during which he extolled affirmative action. Here is the full description of the reception:

Last night, Dorothy and I attended a reception for Columbia University alumni. (Dorothy attended graduate school there.) The event was the introduction of the new president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who got her LL.B. from Columbia University Law School, was a featured guest at the event, and sat in the front row for Bollinger’s address.

Bollinger took the occasion to promote his position in favor of affirmative action. I found two things about this event interesting. First, Bollinger had at least two obvious applause lines in the affirmative action section of his speech, but, by my observation at least, only about a third of the audience applauded either time. (I couldn’t see Justice Ginsburg to determine if she applauded or abstained.) Second, given that the University of Michigan affirmative action case, Gratz v. Bollinger, is currently under consideration by the Supreme Court, does anyone else find it unseemly either that Bollinger would take this occasion to address a Supreme Court Justice about it, or that a sitting Supreme Court Justice would attend an event to honor the defendant in a case that she is currently deciding? Since Bollinger is the former Dean of the University of Michigan Law School who is the named defendant in the Michigan case, and since the case hinges on actions that Bollinger personally took, ordered, or approved of, does anyone else think that either person’s behavior went beyond unseemly to unethical?

I am not a legal ethics expert, and I don’t know if this is a significant issue or not. However, I can certainly see an argument that a Supreme Court Justice ought not attend a function honoring a defendant in a pending case, at which the defendant makes a speech which supports his position in that case.

Thanks to Gary Imhoff for the tip. I have passed this along to the folks at the Los Angeles Times. We’ll see what, if anything, comes of it.

(Cross-posted at Oh, That Liberal Media.)