wwltv.com
Posted on May 29, 2014 at 10:37 PM
Updated
Friday, May 30 at 2:18 PM
...And that new so-called "matching" policy (click here) is expected to save BP millions, possibly billions, of dollars compared to what it would have had to pay under the accounting rules Juneau had been using to calculate losses and test eligibility.
But at the same time, BP is also asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the halt on all business loss payments. That brings up persistent questions about the relationship of two Supreme Court justices to the law firm handling BP’s appeal.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito each has a son who works at Gibson Dunn, a large national firm renowned for its Supreme Court appeals practice. In fact, the firm brags on its website that it gets more than 30 percent of its appeals to the High Court heard, while the overall average is less than 1 percent.
Gibson Dunn’s appellate group, led by former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, asked the Supreme Court to hear BP’s case against Juneau’s payment methods and also filed a separate request to stop the business payments in the interim.
Alito’s son, Phil, just became an associate in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office last August. But Scalia’s son, Eugene, has been at Gibson Dunn for more than a decade and has been a full partner since 2003. That means he would share in profits for all the firm’s cases, making his relationship to Justice Scalia an issue under the law.
U.S. Code Title 28, Section 455 requires federal judges and justices to recuse themselves if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” or if their close relative or a close relative’s spouse “is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”...
