Rules of the Robe

M

ichael Van Deelen’s home office, on the second floor of his neat two-story house in a north Harris County suburb, sprawls across two studies, each equipped with desks and computers. One contains a library chock full of books, including Black’s Law Dictionary and hefty volumes of state and federal statutes. A sunken room, a few steps down, includes an extra window unit air conditioner and a queen-sized bed, in case Van Deelen gets too hot or too tired writing his latest legal brief.

Van Deelen is no lawyer, but he’s an experienced pro se litigant who’s filed and represented himself in plenty of lawsuits. As a result, he told the Texas Observer in a 2023 interview, he’s well used to dealing with scorn from judges and lawyers alike.

His most high-profile case so far began in 2020, when he started challenging the decisions of David R. Jones, then the chief judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, in the bankruptcy of McDermott International, a construction company in which Van Deelen and his wife owned stock. (After interviews in 2023, Van Deelen declined further comment in 2025 on any aspects of the case because elements of it are ongoing.)

Initially, Van Deelen detailed his arguments in what’s called an adversarial proceeding, though he felt vastly outnumbered by the huge number of attorneys involved in the case, including those from a powerful Houston law firm called Jackson Walker LLP.  

Wearing his best gray suit and a silk tie, Van Deelen repeatedly drove his trusty Ford F-150 some 25 miles to downtown Houston to file petitions. Sometimes when he came to court, he’d try to get permission to argue his position that McDermott International, a massive Houston construction and engineering firm that served the energy industry, had not properly disclosed its troubles to stockholders before it filed a bankruptcy petition to reorganize a whopping $4.6 billion in debt. 

From the start, Van Deelen believed that Jones, seated at a dais where he looked down on Van Deelen and everyone else, seemed friendly to the opposing attorneys and hostile to his arguments.

As the chief bankruptcy judge since 2015, Jones presided over one of the country’s busiest bankruptcy courts. In fact, during his tenure he’d handled an astonishing 11 percent of all Chapter 11 bankruptcies involving firms with debts of more than $100 million nationwide, more than any other judge, according to Debtwire, a firm that tracks and analyzes bankruptcy case trends. Jackson Walker, a large Texas firm, represented parties in many of those cases.

Then, in early March 2021, Van Deelen found an unusual legal-sized envelope in his home mailbox with no return address. It contained a one-page typed message: Judge Jones “had a clear conflict of interest” in hearing cases involving Jackson Walker LLP due to his “romantic relationship” with Elizabeth Freeman, who was a partner at the firm and had previously been Jones’ law clerk, the letter said.

Van Deelen used that information to try to get Jones to recuse himself from the case, but at first he got nowhere since he lacked proof of Jones’ alleged relationship. 

That changed when two years later he signed up for an inexpensive internet backgrounding service that gave him access to public records databases—initially to help a younger friend screen prospective dates, Van Deelen told the Observer in 2023.

Sitting in his quiet office, Van Deelen typed in the name of Jones’ purported girlfriend and got two hits: an address for a house valued at $1.4 million near Coldspring, a tiny town about an hour north of Houston, and another for a $1 million home in the Memorial Villages section of west Houston. Both homes were also linked to Jones: Public records showed that in 2017, the judge and Freeman bought the 3,786-square-foot Memorial Villages home together, and that Freeman was still listed as co-owner. Freeman was also tied to the Coldspring address. She’d listed that address as a residence for years before Jones bought it in September 2016. 

Working quickly, Van Deelen added printouts with that information and a copy of the anonymous letter and filed what’s called a Bivens complaint—a lawsuit in which a plaintiff can seek monetary damages from a federal government official for alleged violations of their constitutional rights—on October 4, 2023, formally accusing Jones of misconduct.

Chief Bankruptcy Judge David R. Jones in 2020 (Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

Van Deelen figured it would be hard to get any action in response to allegations of misconduct by a powerful federal judge. “I knew there was a federal judicial misconduct complaint system—I didn’t know how robust it was,” he told the Observer around that same time.

But when the allegations hit the press days later, the federal courts responded almost immediately. In mid-October, during another bankruptcy hearing, Jones publicly admitted to the relationship and announced that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had launched an unusual misconduct investigation and that all of his cases were being assigned to other judges.

“I hope that you can appreciate that the integrity of the process is simply more important than a single case and you have my genuine apologies for the inconvenience that I am causing,” Jones said, according to Reuters’ account of the hearing.

That same day, Chief Judge Priscilla Richman of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, who handled an initial inquiry, filed her own formal misconduct complaint dated October 13, alleging Jones had potentially made several violations of the federal judges’ code of conduct. “I have conducted an inquiry and find there is probable cause to believe that misconduct by Judge Jones has occurred,” she wrote in the complaint, detailing a list of how Jones may have violated judicial canons.

It looked like other federal judges in the powerful Fifth Circuit would now be forced to form a special committee to formally investigate the misconduct allegations first made public by Van Deelen. 

But three days later, that investigation evaporated when Jones submitted his letter of resignation with the effective date of November 15, 2023, according to a follow-up order issued by Richman.

Since 1980, the U.S. federal courts have overseen a secretive system that allows judges to investigate and sanction their own peers under a law called the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act. Nationwide, only a handful of these complaints are ever investigated. The system is almost entirely behind-the-scenes, and even when rare disciplinary actions are taken they’re typically not made public. At most, jurists using their disciplinary powers can typically only recommend that other judges be reprimanded or have their cases suspended, since the majority of federal court judges are appointed for life under Article III of the U.S. Constitution. But federal bankruptcy and magistrate judges including Jones serve shorter terms.

Jones’ rapid resignation basically ended any formal judicial probe of the complaint against him. The act doesn’t apply to former judges, so jurists can avoid being investigated by their peers by choosing to resign or retire.

The fact that Richman made her complaint against Jones public was highly unusual. Both Richman, chief judge from 2019 to 2024, and her predecessor, Judge Carl E. Stewart, who served as chief from 2012 to 2019, released very little information about the hundreds of complaints they each investigated. 

Early in his term as chief judge, Stewart received a complaint filed by 13 attorneys from various civil rights, ethics, and death penalty groups involving a law school speech made by Edith Jones, the previous chief circuit judge, about defendants in capital cases including allegedly disparaging comments about Black people, Mexican nationals, and those with mental disabilities. The complaint also alleged Jones had told another circuit judge to shut up during a court proceeding.

Stewart referred those complaints to the D.C. Circuit Court for investigation.

It was subsequently dismissed after the D.C. Circuit investigation found that Jones had apologized to her fellow judge and did not commit misconduct in her speech, according to an 88-page document released in February 2015.  

In his seven years as Fifth Circuit chief, Stewart reviewed more than 980 complaints, according to judicial statistics. He established special committees at least 11 times to investigate them. But Stewart never issued any public disciplinary order that named any judge as a subject of complaint.

Richman reviewed 677 complaints and established only one special committee to investigate a case in fiscal year (FY) 2021—she never publicly clarified what that matter involved.

Both Richman and Stewart took additional actions behind the scenes—judicial disciplinary statistics show that both dismissed complaints after some type of confidential corrective action or unexplained event occurred.

When asked about the lack of public disclosure about the chief judges’ investigative efforts and disciplinary actions, Garrett Cain, who acts as a spokesperson for the chief judges and for the Fifth Circuit on judicial misconduct matters, told the Observer via email that “The judicial misconduct complaint process is confidential, and I cannot comment on any complaint matter.”

Richman only issued one public complaint—that involving David R. Jones. But that was not the only high-profile judicial misconduct matter brought to the attention of the Fifth Circuit. 

Records and media reports show that Chief Judges Richman and Stewart were alerted to a yearslong  string of allegations made public about another Houston judge: U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes.

In FY 2024, when Richman lodged her own complaint about Jones, 110 people filed formal complaints about federal judges working somewhere in the three-state territory that makes up the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Chief judges can—and rarely do—use their powers to file their own complaints, statistics show. But Richman’s complaint—based on the information Van Deelen had unearthed—was the only matter publicly naming a judge that was posted by the Fifth Circuit under her tenure as chief judge from FY 2019 through 2024.

Nationwide, more than 1,500 complaints were filed against federal judges in 2023; more than 90 percent of them were dismissed without any investigation, particularly those made by prisoners or by litigants.

A very small number of judicial misconduct complaints—around one or two a year—are formally investigated through a secretive process that typically involves the chief circuit judge setting up a special committee. 

Those special committees are then supposed to make recommendations to the Fifth Circuit’s judicial council, a larger governing body of judges that can approve some kind of formal disciplinary action—like a reprimand or a reassignment of cases. Formal disciplinary action is very rare. 

“We never heard anything. Not even ‘We got it.’”

In response to the complaint about Judge David R. Jones, there’s no indication that any special committee was ever formed.

In December 2023, another federal bankruptcy judge ordered a review of legal fees awarded to law firms in connection to 17 cases that were overseen by Jones. But that action came in response to motions filed by the U.S. Trustee’s Office, a U.S. Department of Justice watchdog for bankruptcy courts, which was challenging legal fees and expenses paid to Jackson Walker for work in Jones’ court, records show. 

Still, the trustee’s actions seemed unlikely to address larger ethical questions that Van Deelen first raised in federal court filings about Jones’ role in appointing lucrative cases to Jackson Walker, the firm that employed Jones’ former law clerk and romantic partner—or why Jones had for years failed to disclose his personal relationship with Freeman, as required by court ethics and recusal rules.

Gabe Roth, founder of Fix the Court, a nonprofit that studies the judiciary and recommends reforms, argues that the judiciary should be more accountable and provide more information to the public whenever allegations of judicial misconduct are substantiated, such as with Jones. “My hope is there’s going to be some more action from the chief [district] judge, the circuit judge, maybe even the judicial council—and guidelines to judges about what their responsibilities are.”

In a 2023 email, Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for Jackson Walker, confirmed that the firm received the same anonymous letter in 2021 as Van Deelen and had questioned Freeman about it at that time. “Our firm acted in a timely fashion once we learned of this issue, including conducting a full inquiry and consulting independent outside ethics counsel for their guidance. From the time we first learned of this allegation Ms. Freeman was instructed not to work or bill on any cases before Judge Jones. We are confident that we acted responsibly.” Wilkinson said there were no additional updates when reached in 2025.

But the relationship was known to many others in legal circles, according to reports by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg—and it appears that from 2021 to 2023 neither federal court leaders nor fellow attorneys took the time to consult the same easily accessible real estate information that Van Deelen found on the internet to confirm the conflict of interest.

In mid-August 2024, Jones, by then a former bankruptcy judge, was publicly admonished by Eduardo V. Rodriguez, his successor as Houston’s chief bankruptcy judge. (Jones is still a practicing attorney, State Bar of Texas records show. He did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

Rodriguez signed an order that required Jones to take legal ethics training after it was disclosed that Jones had given a private interview to attorneys who are now defending Jackson Walker as part of the ongoing legal dispute over fees. Jones gave the interview rather than responding to questions in a deposition, thereby avoiding giving any statements about his actions as a judge under oath, as the U.S. Trusteereviewing the legal fees had requested. The ruling said Jones “acted in bad faith.”

Several other federal judges around the country have been accused in a series of recent investigative reports by Fix the Court, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets of failing to disclose gifts and partnerships in federal forms or of failing to recuse themselves despite having financial or personal relationships that might affect their rulings. 

Those allegations continue to spawn more questions about why laws and ethics rules for the federal courts are so weak—and why formal investigations and disciplinary actions for federal judges who admit to violating them are so rare.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ glaring and previously unreported conflicts of interest were revealed in more than a dozen stories by reporters at ProPublica in 2022 and 2023. For 20 years, Thomas regularly accepted gifts from billionaires, including two 2019 luxury vacations paid for by Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow to exotic locales including Bali and an all-male retreat in Northern California.

But federal judicial misconduct law doesn’t apply to Supreme Court justices. In November 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first code of conduct.

It’s hard to believe that Thomas’ colleagues didn’t know he was flying around and spending time with Crow, and yet no one who worked or practiced in the Supreme Court ever previously publicly questioned why Thomas wasn’t disclosing those trips. Instead, Thomas initially defended himself in a statement released by a law firm. “Justice Thomas’s critics allege that he failed to report gifts from wealthy friends,” his lawyer said. “Untrue.”

In 2024, Thomas amended his federal reports to belatedly disclose the two pricey 2019 trips with Crow, saying they were “inadvertently omitted.” But by then more omissions had been discovered. Another ProPublica story revealed Thomas had not disclosed substantial payments Crow made for the former’s grand-nephew’s tuition at a pricey school.

Of course, Thomas isn’t the only jurist to accept travel on private planes with wealthy friends. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016 during a hunting trip to a Texas ranch after flying there by private plane with a prominent Washington attorney for the gathering of an elite secret hunting society of which the attorney and ranch owner were both members.

In a separate study, Fix the Court published more information about 200 previously undisclosed trips taken by Supreme Court justices between January 2018 and September 2022, based on a public information request it filed with the U.S. Marshals Service.

Fix the Court has argued, so far mostly unsuccessfully, that the federal judicial misconduct system should be reformed and that disclosure rules should be beefed up. (The nonprofit recently worked on and supported U.S. Representative Hank Johnson’s 2025 bill, the TRUST Act, which would ensure that judicial councils and the Judicial Conference continue misconduct investigations even after a subject judge resigned.)

Many other politicians and jurists have a long tradition of accepting expensive gifts from friends in Texas and Louisiana. In fact, accepting (and failing to disclose) hunting and fishing trips and cash from two attorney friends who wanted favors from him in court was among the factors that led to the rare impeachment and removal of a New Orleans federal district judge, G. Thomas Porteous Jr., in 2010.

Judges can take stronger action against federal magistrates and against bankruptcy judges like Jones, jurists who are not appointed for life and can be removed from office more easily.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (Wikimedia)

But federal district, circuit, and Supreme Court judges are nominated by presidents, confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and serve for life. A vote of impeachment by the House of Representatives and a vote of removal by the Senate is the only way a federal district or circuit judge, appointed under Article III of the Constitution, can be removed from office. Since 1804, only 15 judges have been impeached and only eight were removed from office. In 2010, Porteous became the last federal judge to be impeached and removed. The year prior, U.S. District Judge Samuel Bristow Kent was impeached for sex crimes and for lying to a Fifth Circuit panel which investigated his misconduct.

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published its own study of nationwide conflicts of interest involving federal judges. The newspaper found that 138 judges had broken the law by participating in court cases that involved companies in which they or a relative had a financial interest. 

But even this recent spate of public scandals has generated surprisingly little response from the federal courts themselves. Many chief circuit judges, including in the Fifth Circuit, have chosen not to formally investigate even some of the most high-profile and heavily publicized complaints against their peers.

Senior U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, who, like Jones, was based in Houston, drew a long series of complaints over more than a decade that have been documented by whistleblowers and mentioned in court cases and news articles.

In 2013, the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) made two formal complaints against Hughes—a lifetime appointee who oversaw civil rights cases, employment law matters, criminal cases, and all types of legal disputes in the Southern District of Texas. In the first, lawyers in TCRP’s Houston office argued that Hughes had made discriminatory comments in a court case involving alleged racial discrimination. “Judge Hughes’ statements and actions … are not anomalous, but, rather, consistent with a demonstrated practice of bias and prejudice against alleged victims of discrimination,” the group stated in its complaint filed with the Fifth Circuit. In a follow-up misconduct complaint against Hughes, the group accused him of making both racist and sexist remarks to litigants and lawyers.

Among other examples, the second complaint said Hughes once berated a pair of Vietnamese lawyers, saying “Given their national origin, they should go and practice labor law in North Korea.” The TCRP made both complaints public to try to put pressure on the courts to take action.

Jim Harrington, the attorney who founded the TCRP and signed the second complaint, called the Fifth Circuit to follow up, but he never got any response. “We never heard anything. Not even ‘We got it,’” he told the Observer in a recent interview.

The courts’ failure to publicly address the complaints was disappointing given the seriousness of the allegations, Harrington said. “In terms of the integrity of the legal system, that stuff should be dealt with. Some types [of comments] were racially charged. Some were sexually charged. It’s totally unbecoming conduct, and it raised questions about his objectivity.”

Following those complaints, a number of allegations about Hughes’ alleged racist or sexist remarks were included in appeals of criminal and civil cases Hughes oversaw. But if any of the litigants or attorneys in those cases filed judicial misconduct complaints against Hughes, no one made them public. 

“It’s like when police police themselves. It doesn’t always work.”

In 2018, during the appeal of a criminal case, the Fifth Circuit issued a decision that criticized Hughes for allegedly targeting a female federal prosecutor in a hearing, attributing errors made by the prosecution to her sex and saying, “We didn’t let girls do it in the old days.” That remark, made in the presence of a female prosecutor, prompted a mild rebuke: In a footnote, one judge called Hughes’ remarks “demeaning, inappropriate and beneath the dignity of a federal judge.” 

Ryan Patrick, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, later objected in court after Hughes barred the same female prosecutor from his court for mentioning in an appeal that Hughes had referred to female federal agents as “girls.” (Hughes’ ban was eventually lifted by yet another Fifth Circuit ruling.) 

Behind the scenes, another Department of Justice official filed a formal misconduct complaint in 2019 about Hughes’ behavior—but it was never disclosed by the Fifth Circuit. The complaint became public only after the Washington nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) obtained it as part of discovery in a lawsuit and it was posted by Thomson Reuters.

Again, separate from any judicial misconduct matter, Hughes was removed in 2021 from overseeing a university professor’s alleged discrimination case because of evidence of bias noted in an appellate court decision. At that point, Hughes was being overturned in some 72 percent of his cases and had been called out in several opinions handed down by the appellate judges. 

But Carl Stewart, who oversaw all judicial misconduct complaints as the chief judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals from 2012 to 2019, never publicly indicated that he had formed a special committee to investigate TCRP’s complaints in 2013. Nor did the court make it public if Stewart took any actions against Hughes that were related to allegations contained in appeals of Hughes’ cases—though the chief judge can initiate his or her own misconduct complaint under the 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act if complaints are considered serious enough.

A spokesman for the Fifth Circuit told the Observer via email that Stewart formed several special committees. But judicial disciplinary statistics do not show any committee was formed around the time that formal complaints were filed against Hughes by TCRP in FY 2013. Stewart did form committees in FY 2019, but no information was ever released on their activities.

In 2022, Randall Kallinen, a Houston lawyer, tried to get Hughes removed from a civil rights case after Hughes publicly belittled one of his clients—Morgan Grice, a 34-year-old financial advisor—who’d filed a lawsuit against the Bellaire Police Department after nearly being beaten to death by a police officer following a traffic stop in the tony Houston enclave. Kallinen never made a formal complaint, but the allegations appeared in his appeal to the Fifth Circuit and in a front page story in the Houston Chronicle.

Grice admitted she had been drinking at an office party before a Bellaire police officer stopped her. The Harvard graduate and mother of a toddler had no criminal history and was disoriented when the police officer ordered her out of her car. The officer then appeared to get angry when she refused a blood test, according to court records and Grice. “That led to him physically slamming me—with my hands pinned behind my back,” against a sidewalk, she told the Observer in a 2022 interview. Video from the officer’s body cam showed that medics urged Grice be immediately taken to the emergency room to avoid permanent injury or death. “A huge lump formed immediately on my eye. But the officer said ‘no,’” she said.

Grice suffered a brain contusion, court records show, and it was months later, after being treated for her brain injury, that Grice learned, by chance, that the officer who hurt her had also filed DUI charges against her, according to information in her related civil lawsuit. Grice chose not to contest those charges, but her lawsuit challenged the force used against her as excessive and a violation of her constitutional rights. 

Civil rights attorney Randall Kallinen in a Houston art gallery space that doubles as his office (Annie Mulligan for the Texas Observer)

Hughes rapidly dismissed the case, agreeing with an attorney representing the officer that there was no evidence of excessive force despite the video and medical records that Grice provided. Hughes dismissed the notion that Grice, who is Latina, could have been targeted as an ethnic minority. According to a transcript, quoted in the Houston Chronicle, the judge said: “She appears to be a woman. I’m willing to go with that.” After she told him she was Mexican-American, he added: “Mexicans look Anglo enough for me.” 

In the end, Grice told the Observer she felt as traumatized by the federal judge’s ruling as by her injuries: “The actual event of being head slammed has been diluted—it’s more like the attorney and this judge who have become so much more oppressive and problematic and make me feel so small.”

Kallinen never filed a formal judicial misconduct complaint. But under the federal judicial misconduct law, the chief judge has the option to initiate their own review if a complaint becomes public knowledge—like Hughes’ remarks toward Grice or the Houston prosecutor. 

Kallinen filed a recusal petition accusing Hughes of bias and went public with his concerns. Hughes’ actions were also described in appeals that were reviewed by both a Fifth Circuit panel and by a larger body. In the end, he felt he never got anywhere. 

“These judges are appointed for life—and the concept of being appointed for life is that they’re not easily influenced—not subject to the whims or present concerns of someone else or an electorate. Even if they have extreme views, they’ll be tolerated,” Kallinen said. “It’s like when police police themselves. It doesn’t always work.”

In July 2024, Richman belatedly revealed in a public order that the Fifth Circuit Judicial Council had investigated the matter of Hughes referring to prosecutors as “girls”—which had been reported by the Houston Chronicle and other outlets six years before—and of Hughes’ subsequent attempt to permanently ban the female prosecutor.

But by then Hughes had retired and was no longer handling any cases.

No action was taken. “I agree … that the judge’s above described conduct was improper. I note, however, that, in the interim, the judge has taken senior inactive status, relinquished all of his cases, and is no longer assigned new cases,” Richman wrote.

She posted the order on the Fifth Circuit website shortly before leaving her post as chief judge after serving only five years of the usual seven-year term. She had by then reached the age of 70, the maximum for a chief judge, the Fifth Circuit spokesman said.

In the end, the official system provided less accountability for Hughes than it did for Jones, the bankruptcy judge whose misconduct was initially investigated by Van Deelen, a grandfather and a pro se litigant who spent only a few minutes on his home computer to find proof of an allegation in an anonymous letter.

For Harrington, who had complained about Hughes back in 2013, the delayed action was inexplicable.

“This speaks almost as badly of the Fifth Circuit as it does of Hughes—sending a message to the public that this kind of conduct is not going to be punished,” he said.

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