Mary Geiger Lewis acquired Walmart Inc. stock. Charles Norgle Sr. reported nearly a dozen buys and sells of Pfizer Inc. shares. Charles Siragusa had two accounts that bought Medtronic PLC stock.
None of that would be a problem, except for this: All are federal judges, and at the time of the trades, all were hearing cases involving those companies.
The Wall Street Journal discovered this trading in a broad investigation that identified 131 federal judges who heard hundreds of cases between 2010 and 2018 involving companies in which they or a family member owned stock—in violation of federal law and judicial-ethics rules.
Judges Lewis, Norgle and Siragusa were among 61 judges who didn’t just own stocks of companies that were litigants in their courtrooms. Accounts held by the judges or their families traded shares as suits were progressing, the Journal’s investigation found. Nearly half of the judges reported more than one trade while a case was in progress.