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The Supreme Court just handed down a 6-3 decision in Wyeth v. Levine, a blow to the pharmaceutical industry and a big win for quirky Vermont guitarist Diana Levine, who can now get in line behind Lily Ledbetter and Susette Kelo as the human (female) faces of recent Supreme Court controversies. Tony Mauro notes that Chief Justice Roberts joined the dissenters, even though his most recent financial disclosure forms indicated he owned stock in Pfizer. With the announcement that Pfizer and Wyeth would merge, and in light of Robert's practice of recusing himself from cases in which Pfizer was a party, it had been suggested that he might withdraw from this case as well, since the outcome would likely have an effect on the value of Wyeth. Of course, Roberts may have shed his Pfizer stock since he filed the disclosure form. But the occasion of all this unseemly Dumpster-diving into the justices' portfolios highlights the problem of allowing judges to police their own conflicts of interest in secret.
At oral argument in a major case about judicial recusal heard just yesterday by the court, Roberts said in the strongest possible terms that "the recusal rules are, you know, if you have one share of AT&T stock and it's in AT&T, you have to recuse." He sided with Wyeth today.