Money and Campaign Resources

The first three prohibitions in Rule 4.1(A) keep a judge's title, voice, and name from serving a faction. A judge or judicial candidate may not act as a leader in, or hold an office in, a political organization, make speeches on behalf of one, or publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for any public office.¹ Each of those paragraphs regulates what the judge is, says, or publicly declares. Political support travels by other routes, though. A check helps a faction as surely as a speech does, and a seat at its fundraising dinner lends the judge's presence to its cause. The remaining prohibitions in Rule 4.1(A) close those routes, and this section covers the ones that concern money and campaign resources.

The rules fall into two groups that face opposite directions. The first group looks outward. It governs what a judge gives, and where a judge appears, in support of someone else's politics: whether the judge may raise money for a political organization or candidate, pay money to one, or attend its events. A silent contribution or a seat at a party dinner communicates alignment without a word, and the recipient knows who helped. The first subsection, on contributions and political events, takes up this group.

The second group looks inward, at the resources of the judge's own race. A campaign spends money that donors gave to elect a candidate, and a court's staff and facilities exist to serve the court. Either can be misdirected: campaign money toward private ends, court personnel and equipment toward a campaign. Two paragraphs of Rule 4.1(A) police those misdirections, and the second subsection pairs them because each keeps a resource gathered or held for one purpose from serving another.

Compliance with the earlier rules does not carry over to these. A candidate who routes every dollar through an authorized committee satisfies the campaign committee rule, yet a check to a party or a campaign errand for a court clerk still violates the rules here. A judge who holds no party office and gives no party speeches has met the first two core prohibitions and can still break a money rule. For an exam stem, ask which way the money or resource is moving and whose cause it serves. Money and presence given to other people's politics belong to the first subsection; campaign funds and court resources used in the judge's own race belong to the second.

Contributions and Political Events

Rule 4.1(A)(4) bars a judge or judicial candidate from soliciting funds for, paying an assessment to, or making a contribution to a political organization or a candidate for public office.² The three verbs cover three ways money moves. To solicit is to ask others to give, an assessment is a payment an organization levies on those affiliated with it, and a contribution is a gift the judge hands over. Both kinds of recipient are named, so a gift to a county party committee and a gift to someone's campaign for sheriff fall under the same sentence. The endorsement paragraph bars a judge from announcing support for a candidate;³ this paragraph bars paying a candidate. Support the judge may not announce aloud cannot be delivered by check either.

The reasons for the rule become clear when a gift is followed from the judge's hand. The recipient will typically record it, and the donor's name goes onto a list. The recipient's members and backers may include lawyers and litigants, some of whom will eventually stand before the donor in court. A judge who has funded the recipient has entered a financial relationship with people who may appear in that courtroom, and a losing litigant gains a reason to suspect that the ruling repaid a debt, however evenhanded it was. Because the harm lies in visible alignment, the size of the gift does not matter: a $25 check places the judge beside one side of the contest just as a larger check would. Each verb adds a concern of its own. Solicitation asks people who know that the requester may decide their cases. An assessment accepts an organization's standing claim on the judge's money, as a member would.

Rule 4.1(A)(5) applies the same premise to the judge's presence. It forbids a judge or judicial candidate to attend, or to purchase tickets for, dinners or other events sponsored by a political organization or a candidate for public office.⁴ A political dinner does two jobs at once. The ticket price is a donation in all but name, and the seat at the table is a public showing that the judge belongs among the party's workers, donors, and candidates. The two verbs close different gaps. Purchasing tickets reaches money sent to an event the judge never attends, and attending reaches presence when a friend paid for the seat or the invitation was free. A judge cannot avoid the rule by letting someone else cover the cost.

The words “sponsored by” decide which events count. The test asks who puts the event on, because the host's purpose determines what a guest's presence communicates. A party dinner exists to elect candidates, so every guest lends presence to that effort and every ticket funds it. A candidate who appears as one guest among hundreds at someone else's function brings no such purpose to the occasion. When a stem mixes civic and political elements, ask whose event it is.

The same ballroom, guests, and charity auction would produce the opposite answer if the candidate for county executive put the evening on as a campaign fundraiser. The judge's ticket and attendance would then be directed at an event sponsored by a candidate for public office. A statement in a stem that a candidate attended is a fact about the guest list, and the rule asks about the host.

The same logic follows the judge into the household. In In re Gaulkin, the court addressed a judge's spouse's political activity and drew a line around the judge's own money and presence. It said that using the marital home for a political or fundraising meeting, or making political contributions from the common family funds, would come within its objection, and that the judge would have to forgo even the ordinary courtesy of accompanying the spouse to a political gathering of any kind.⁵ It added that contributions to a judge's spouse's campaign by attorneys or litigants who are or may be involved in practice before that judge would be particularly offensive from an ethical standpoint.⁶ Its governing standard was this: “The administration of justice must be free of such appearance, as well as the fact.”⁷

Gaulkin is an opinion and not the text of paragraphs (A)(4) and (A)(5), so it explains the concern and does not state the rule. The explanation fits the text closely. A judge's check from the common family funds to a spouse's campaign is a contribution to a candidate for public office, and the judge's seat at the spouse's campaign dinner is attendance at an event sponsored by a candidate for public office. Neither paragraph restricts the spouse's own candidacy, so a judge who sends no money and attends nothing breaks neither one.

These paragraphs concern money and presence given to other people's politics. A judge's own race, with its committee and its opening exceptions, falls under the campaign committee rule taught earlier in this chapter, so an essay about a candidate raising money for her own election should not be run through paragraph (A)(4) alone.

Misusing Campaign and Court Resources

Rule 4.1(A)(9) forbids a judge or judicial candidate to “use or permit the use of campaign contributions for the private benefit of the judge, the candidate, or others,” and Rule 4.1(A)(10) forbids using court staff, facilities, or other court resources in a campaign for judicial office.¹⁰ The two paragraphs guard a judge's resources from opposite directions. The campaign committee rule governs how a candidate gathers money, and paragraph (A)(9) governs where the money may go once it is gathered. Paragraph (A)(10) governs resources that were never campaign property, the court's staff, space, and equipment, when they are drawn into a race. Each rule keeps a resource gathered or held for one purpose from serving another.

The money rule rests on what a donor gives for. A contributor gives to a campaign so that the candidate can run for office, and the money stays faithful to that purpose only while it is spent on the race. A candidate who redirects it to personal use converts a gift made for a public contest into private enrichment. The risk is sharper for judges, because contributors to a judicial campaign may include lawyers and litigants who later appear before the candidate. When their gifts pay the judge's own expenses, the contributions look like payments to the judge.

Two features of the text close the obvious escape routes. The rule reaches anyone who uses or permits the use of the funds, so it covers the candidate who never touches the money: a candidate who knows the treasurer is paying a personal bill and allows it has permitted the use. The list of beneficiaries names the judge, the candidate, and others, so steering the benefit to a spouse, a relative, or a friend changes nothing. The text also sets no dollar threshold, so a small personal expense falls within it as surely as a large one.

The destination of the money decided those two scenes. The donors and the committee were the same in both, and only spending that benefited a household turned an ordinary campaign expense into a violation.

The court-resources rule starts from a different premise about ownership. Court staff, courtrooms, and equipment exist so that the court can decide cases. A judge who uses any of them in a campaign for judicial office draws on a public subsidy for a personal ambition, and an opponent who must pay for the same services competes at a disadvantage. The rule also protects the people who work for the judge. An employee whose supervisor asks for campaign help is poorly placed to refuse, so help that looks volunteered may have been extracted. The text names staff, facilities, and other court resources, and the third category works as a catch-all that reaches supplies and equipment such as the court's copier, postage, and letterhead, even when no employee does any work.

Who paid for the clerk's time, and who directed the work, decided the clerk scene. To sort a stem that mixes the two rules, ask which resource moved and where it ended up. Campaign money that ends up in someone's private life belongs to paragraph (A)(9), and court property or court personnel that end up working a campaign belong to paragraph (A)(10). One judge can violate both, for example by printing flyers on the court's copier and then using contributions to buy a personal computer for home, and a complete answer cites each paragraph for its own act. Compliance with the committee rule helps in neither case, because that rule controls only how contributions are raised.