Talk about a comedown. After two fine chief justices of the state's highest court each in his own distinctive way--solid Jim Hannah and scholarly Howard Brill--Courtney Goodson has announced that she'll be running for that high office next year. Now an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, she's asking for a promotion. But what would be a step up for her would be a step down in the conduct this state has a right to expect of its highest judicial official. It's not just the appearance of propriety that Justice Goodson has ignored but propriety itself.
You may remember Justice Goodson from all the news she's made in the past, much of it unseemly. She's the wife of John Goodson, the class-action magnate out of Texarkana. Just as he was appealing a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, specifically before His Honor Antonin Scalia, his wife showed up for a personal introduction to Mr. Justice Scalia, a tete-a-tete arranged by now retired Justice Bob Brown, who's long talked a better game of judicial ethics than he's practiced--from the time he waged a no-holds-barred campaign for his seat on the state's highest court. This meeting between Justices Goodson and Scalia was only the latest spectacle-at-law he's staged.
Justice Goodson has wasted no time releasing her first ad on YouTube, which presents her as an outsider in Arkansas politics when she's really the ultimate insider with connections that run throughout the state's legal, economic and political establishment. Back in 2010, she was taking campaign contributions from just about every insider you can name, including Fort Smith nursing-home mover-and-shaker Michael Morton. And in 2012 Justice Goodson took a $50,000 tour of Italy thanks to one W. H. Taylor, a business associate of her husband's.
Exceptional improprieties tend to be not exceptional at all in Mrs. Justice Goodson's scandal-plagued career. But there's no underestimating her sheer nerve.
Editorial on 09/09/2015