Law & Economics Center

"As senators fought against the findings of their own committee, Koch put another piece of its plan into place. The biggest threat wasn’t emanating from the Senate but from the courts and the US Attorney’s office, two institutions that could not be influenced by campaign donations or lobbyists. In response, Koch initiated a long-term plan to reshape America’s judiciary system. Ron Howell founded an obscure nonprofit group called Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence. It did something unheard of: it started grading local judges based on their fealty to free-market economic theory. The group created scorecards for state judges, measuring how well their verdicts conformed with the teachings of Hayek and von Mises. The group publicized these rankings with public opinion articles published in places like the Daily Oklahoman. The grading system created a way to embarrass judges in the local press by publicizing their low scores. Koch Industries also offered them a way to escape this embarrassment: the company sponsored a series of free seminars that judges could attend if they received poor grades from Koch’s rating system. The seminars were not held in stuffy classrooms. Koch Industries paid for judges to travel to a ski resort in Utah or a beachfront condominium, among other locations, relaxing places where the judges might be more open to Koch’s message. The company held lectures that emphasized the importance of market forces in society, and warned against the consideration of things like “junk science” that plaintiffs often used to prove corporate malfeasance. The seminars were well attended, sometimes by more than sixty judges at a time. A Kansas state district court judge named Michael Corrigan attended a Koch-sponsored seminar at the Sundial Beach Resort in Sanibel, Florida, and another at the University of Kansas; in between these seminars he handled two cases involving Koch Industries without disclosing the potential conflict of interest, according to an account later published in the Wall Street Journal. The junkets that it organized might have been disclosed or even regulated if they were enjoyed by other public officials, such as members of Congress. But there were no such restraints on treating judges to all-paid vacations, perhaps because no one had thought to organize such events on such a large scale before. Koch’s efforts to sway judges evolved over many years. By 2016, it had transformed into a new program that offered free seminars to judges called the Law & Economics Center, which was housed at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, along with Koch’s free-market think tank, the Mercatus Center. The Law & Economics Center claimed to have hosted more than four thousand state and federal judges from all fifty states at its seminars."

"As senators fought against the findings of their own committee, Koch put another piece of its plan into place. The biggest threat wasn’t emanating from the Senate but from the courts and the US Attorney’s office, two institutions that could not be influenced by campaign donations or lobbyists. In response, Koch initiated a long-term plan to reshape America’s judiciary system. Ron Howell founded an obscure nonprofit group called Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence. It did something unheard of: it started grading local judges based on their fealty to free-market economic theory. The group created scorecards for state judges, measuring how well their verdicts conformed with the teachings of Hayek and von Mises. The group publicized these rankings with public opinion articles published in places like the Daily Oklahoman. The grading system created a way to embarrass judges in the local press by publicizing their low scores. Koch Industries also offered them a way to escape this embarrassment: the company sponsored a series of free seminars that judges could attend if they received poor grades from Koch’s rating system. The seminars were not held in stuffy classrooms. Koch Industries paid for judges to travel to a ski resort in Utah or a beachfront condominium, among other locations, relaxing places where the judges might be more open to Koch’s message. The company held lectures that emphasized the importance of market forces in society, and warned against the consideration of things like “junk science” that plaintiffs often used to prove corporate malfeasance. The seminars were well attended, sometimes by more than sixty judges at a time. A Kansas state district court judge named Michael Corrigan attended a Koch-sponsored seminar at the Sundial Beach Resort in Sanibel, Florida, and another at the University of Kansas; in between these seminars he handled two cases involving Koch Industries without disclosing the potential conflict of interest, according to an account later published in the Wall Street Journal. The junkets that it organized might have been disclosed or even regulated if they were enjoyed by other public officials, such as members of Congress. But there were no such restraints on treating judges to all-paid vacations, perhaps because no one had thought to organize such events on such a large scale before. Koch’s efforts to sway judges evolved over many years. By 2016, it had transformed into a new program that offered free seminars to judges called the Law & Economics Center, which was housed at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, along with Koch’s free-market think tank, the Mercatus Center. The Law & Economics Center claimed to have hosted more than four thousand state and federal judges from all fifty states at its seminars."