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TO P CO UR T TA LES BY PHILIP SLAYTON All Canadian judges should be required to make full, annual, public disclosure of their assets and liabilities. It's an issue of good governance. money Show me the caught my eye in the article was men- tion that Indian Supreme Court judges are required to post details of their per- sonal financial assets, and those of their spouses, on the court's web site. What a gold mine for those with a prurient interest in final courts of appeal! I clicked on supremecourtofindia. J nic.in/assets.htm and discovered that the Indian Chief Justice Shri K.G. Balakrishnan drives a 2000 Santro car. The wife of Justice Tarun Chatterjee has seven pairs of gold earrings. Justice R.V. Raveendran and his spouse Vasanthi own a lot of real estate and have shares in many public compa- nies. Mrs. Raveendran also has "Gold Jewellery weighing about 370 Grams, ust back from a trip to India, a friend gave me a magazine article on that country's Supreme Court. What Twelve carats of diamonds and five kgs. of silver." Justice Dalveer Bhandari lives in an "old and ancestral house" bought by his grandfather in 1933, and drives a 1987 Fiat. The point of the Indian system, says the magazine article, is to check wheth- er a judge has acquired wealth dispro- portionate to his known sources of income after assuming office. Changes in assets following appointment as a judge have to be disclosed. Financial disclosure, it is believed, ensures public confidence. It also flags any possible conflict of interest. You might think this is just some odd Indian thing, interesting, quaint even, but not relevant to this country. Canada has no requirement of financial disclosure for judges or candidates for appointment. Nor does England. Nor 16 JUNE 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com does Australia. After all, who really cares what kind of car a chief justice drives? But take a look at the United States. The 1978 Ethics in Government Act requires federal judges to disclose per- sonal financial information each year. Candidates for judicial office must also disclose their assets and liabilities. When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, we quickly learned that on Nov. 23, 2008, she won $8,283 gambling with her mother at a Florida casino. We further discovered she had $1.16 million in assets and $418,350 in debts, and spent a lot of money getting her teeth fixed (she owed her dentist $15,000). We found out that she drives a white Saab convertible. Go to oyez.org, a multimedia archive web site devoted to the U.S. Supreme Court, and you can study the financial TODD JULIE