Prohibited Campaign Conduct

Prohibited Campaign Conduct

Rule 4.2(A)(1) requires a judicial candidate to act at all times in a manner consistent with the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary.¹ The seven rules in this section apply that one sentence to particular tactics. Each names a way of campaigning that threatens one of the three values, so a candidate learns in advance that the tactic is off limits and does not have to weigh the values from scratch in the middle of a race. The permissions taught above list what a campaign may include; these rules list what it may never include. The duty to police supporters, taught earlier, carries each prohibition to the people who act for the candidate.

The prohibitions fall into three families, sorted by the value each protects:

• Private benefit from funds, false or misleading statements, and the use of court resources guard integrity, because each is a form of dishonest or self-serving dealing.
• Party leadership and contributions to others guard independence and impartiality, because each ties the candidate to organized politics, whose members and officials may later appear in court.
• Pledges and promises, and public comment on pending cases, guard impartiality, because each lets the candidate prejudge a matter before it is decided: a class of cases in the one, a particular case in the other.

That sorting is also the method for an exam answer. Identify the conduct, find the prohibition that names it, and say which value the conduct compromises. When no listed prohibition fits, the umbrella duty still measures the conduct.²

A prohibition binds the candidate even inside an activity the Rules permit. A candidate may speak through any medium, attend a political event, or raise money through a committee, and none of those permissions cures a message, a promise, or a spending choice that a prohibition forbids. The permission settles whether the channel is open; the prohibition settles what may travel through it. Personal solicitation of campaign funds gets its own treatment in the next section, which takes up the constitutional test for that ban.

A breach exposes the candidate to the state’s judicial discipline process, which can culminate in a formal proceeding, a hearing, a decision, and a proposed sanction. Available sanctions range from private reprimand to public reprimand, to suspension, to removal from office.³ The first prohibition concerns what a campaign does with the money it collects.

Private Benefit From Funds

Contributions to a judicial campaign are given for an election, and Rule 4.1 forbids a judge or judicial candidate to use them for the private benefit of the judge, the candidate, or others, or to permit anyone else to do so. The ban is the duty to act consistently with the judiciary’s integrity⁴ applied to money. Integrity, as taught earlier, includes honesty and uprightness, and the question this ban asks is whether the candidate dealt straight with the people who supplied the funds.

The ban rests on two reasons. The first concerns the donors. A contribution is a gift made for a purpose: the giver expects it to pay for what a race requires, such as printing, advertising, and the cost of reaching voters. A candidate who diverts it to a car payment or a vacation takes funds entrusted for one use and spends them on another, which is dishonest dealing with every person who gave. The wrong is complete at the moment of diversion, because the rule tests the use of the money and no ruling needs to follow. A candidate who treats a campaign account as a personal purse also shows voters how the candidate will handle a position of trust.

The second reason concerns what outsiders will infer. Donors to judicial campaigns often include lawyers and litigants who may later appear before the person they funded, so every contribution already invites the suspicion that support is being traded for favor. When the money pays for signs and advertising, the campaign explains where it went, and the public can see that donors bought a race and nothing more. When it lands in the candidate’s pocket, that explanation disappears, and each gift looks like a payment to the person who will decide the donor’s cases. Diverted contributions thus damage integrity directly and give the public reason to doubt independence and impartiality as well.

The text of the ban has three parts. The first is the use of contributions: the money must go to the election purposes for which donors gave it, and spending it on the candidate’s own ends breaches the ban whatever the amount. The second is the reference to permitting use, which reaches a candidate who never touches the checkbook. Campaigns run through treasurers, consultants, and committee members, and a ban confined to the candidate’s own spending would let an aide carry out the diversion while the candidate looked away. The third is the list of beneficiaries, which names the judge, the candidate, and others, so a benefit routed to a relative, a friend, or a supporter’s business harms donors and the public just as one routed to the candidate does.

The ordinary campaign bill sits on the other side of the line. The same account spent on yard signs, mailers, and advertising, with each expense reported as the law requires, buys exactly what the donors expected, and the candidate gains only a chance at a seat that the voters decide. For any expenditure, ask what the campaign received for the money and who, apart from the campaign, gained from it. Campaign finance statutes may list permitted expenses in more detail, and the duty to comply with election laws, taught earlier, makes those lists binding too, but the Code’s ban operates alongside them as a separate prohibition.

The family tie, then, does not move the answer in Prescott’s case, because the same payee could be paid lawfully for work the campaign actually received. What decides it is that the campaign got nothing in return, so the contributions went to a private end while the candidate knew and did nothing. Students lose points here in two ways. Some treat the ban as a reporting rule and clear a candidate because the expense was disclosed, which forgets that disclosure shows what the money bought without making the purchase a campaign purpose. Others clear a candidate because the sum was small or no donor had a case pending, which forgets that the ban tests the use of the money and that integrity suffers whenever funds given for a race go to private ends.

Party Leadership

Rule 4.1 forbids a judge or judicial candidate to hold an office in a political organization or to act as a leader in one. A political organization is a party or similar group that exists to elect candidates. The first clause covers a formal post such as chair, vice chair, or treasurer; the second reaches a person who directs the organization’s work without a title. The ban applies the duty to protect the judiciary’s impartiality and independence⁷ to a standing relationship with organized politics. Where the ban on private benefit rests on integrity, this one rests on impartiality, with independence close behind.

A party officer exists to advance the organization’s goals and to elect its candidates, so the post carries a continuing duty to the party for as long as the officer holds it. A judge who owes that duty is poorly placed to act as a neutral arbiter in cases that touch the organization, whether the litigant is a member, an official, or a rival. The party also holds a standing claim on the officer’s time and loyalty, and that outside pull is what the independence value excludes.

Two separate harms follow, and the ban answers both. The first is to actual impartiality: the officer’s assigned job is to favor one side of political contests, and a person who has taken on that job will find it hard to set it aside on reaching the bench. The second is to appearance. A litigant on the other side of the party’s quarrels sees the organization’s own officer on the bench and has reason to doubt a fair hearing before any ruling issues. That second harm exists even if the first never occurs, which is why the ban looks at the post and does not wait for proof of bias. It mirrors the appearance standard taught earlier, under which an observer who knows only the outward facts decides whether confidence in the judge is warranted.

Courts treat the interest behind the ban as compelling. One opinion collecting the authority states that states have a “compelling interest” in preventing judges from activities that “would undermine actual impartiality, as well as its appearance,” and it cites Bauer v. Shepard, a Seventh Circuit decision upholding limits on judges acting in posts of political leadership and delivering political speeches.⁸ The same opinion quotes another court for the point that a state “certainly has a compelling state interest in the public’s trust and confidence in the integrity of our judicial system.”⁹ A compelling interest is the weightiest justification a state can offer for restricting political activity, so these citations show that courts see the leadership ban as resting on a strong foundation. They also confirm the two halves of the interest, which match the two harms above: actual impartiality and its appearance.

An exam stem will often say only that a candidate is “active in” a party, which leaves open whether the activity is leadership or ordinary affiliation. The sorting question is whether the candidate holds a post or directs the organization, or merely belongs to it.

Both candidates are partisan in the ordinary sense, so party loyalty cannot decide the result. The post does the work. Tran’s office gives the party a standing expectation about how she spends her time and what she does for its slate, while Whitcomb’s membership gives the party nothing it can demand of him. The line also shows how the ban fits with the permissions taught earlier. A partisan election lets a candidate announce that he is the party’s nominee and attend its events, because those acts carry a label and a presence to the voters without putting the candidate under the organization’s direction. The Code lets a candidate wear the party’s label and forbids taking a command post in the party.

Two errors recur on this topic. Some students reason that because a partisan election permits party identification, party leadership must follow, which treats a label as if it were an office. Others treat every form of party involvement as suspect, which overlooks that membership and attendance are what the permissions allow. A candidate’s remark that no party case has come before the court is no defense either, because the ban tests the post and its two harms include appearance. Because the ban attaches to the post, a candidate who holds one breaches it for as long as the candidate holds it, and compliance means leaving the office. A candidate who stays out of party office can still run into a neighboring ban by writing the party a check, which the next section takes up.

Contributions to Others

Rule 4.1 forbids a judge or judicial candidate to solicit funds for, pay an assessment to, or make a contribution to a political organization or a candidate for public office. The text names three acts: asking others for money on the recipient’s behalf, paying the recipient a levy or fee, and giving it money outright. It names two kinds of recipient: a political organization, which is a party or similar group that exists to elect candidates, and any candidate for public office. Like the umbrella duty it applies,¹¹ the ban keeps the judge’s wallet and fund-raising out of other people’s politics, just as the ban on party leadership keeps the judge out of party office. Both rest chiefly on impartiality.

A contribution is a transfer of value that the recipient can see and remember. The recipients covered here are the organizations and officials who most often turn up in court: a party whose members and officers are litigants, a prosecutor running for reelection, a legislator whose statutes are being construed. A judge who has funded one of them has given that recipient a reason to expect good treatment, which threatens impartiality. The judge has also given the opposing side in any case touching the recipient a reason to doubt that the judge starts from neutral ground, which damages the appearance of impartiality taught earlier. Money creates a continuing relationship as well, since a recipient who has been paid once can ask again, and a judge who gives to an organization is open to the outside pull that the independence value excludes. Each of these harms exists before any ruling and without proof that the judge favored anyone.

Soliciting for others carries a separate harm, which is why the rule lists it as its own act. A request from a judge arrives with the prestige of the bench attached. The lawyers who practice before the judge, the court’s staff, and the judge’s colleagues all know who is asking and cannot easily say no, so refusal risks the judge’s displeasure and agreement looks like a purchase of goodwill. The same reasoning explains why the Code sends a candidate’s own fund-raising through a committee, but that route belongs to the candidate’s own campaign. The permission taught above to form a campaign committee covers the candidate’s own race, and nothing in it extends to raising money for a party or for another candidate, so the judge’s personal request for those causes stays barred.

This ban is a close relative of the rule on endorsements. An endorsement takes a side in a political contest with words, and a contribution takes the same side with money, so the two rules work together to keep a judge from becoming a participant in partisan contests. The permission to endorse another candidate for the same judicial office covers speech only. A check to that candidate’s campaign is a contribution, and nothing in the permissions supplies a justification for it.

The most tempting exam argument runs from a permission to a payment, and it fails at the step where speech becomes money.

Both scenes show that the useful sorting question is whose race the money is for. Money raised through the candidate’s own authorized committee for the candidate’s own campaign, within the jurisdiction’s limits and under the conditions on amount, timing, and disclosure taught earlier, is permitted fund-raising. Money that a judge gives to, or raises for, a party or another candidate is prohibited, whatever its size and whether or not the recipient has any matter in court.

Students go wrong in two opposite directions. Some read the ban as a bar on every money activity during a campaign, which forgets that a candidate may raise funds for the candidate’s own race through a committee. Others read the committee permission as covering gifts to a party or to a friendly candidate, which forgets that the permission reaches only the candidate’s own campaign. A third slip is to excuse a gift because the recipient has no case pending, when the ban tests the act and the appearance it creates.

False or Misleading Statements

Rule 4.1 forbids a judge or judicial candidate to make any false or misleading statement, but only when the speaker acts knowingly or with reckless disregard for the truth. The ban is the duty to act consistently with the judiciary’s integrity¹³ applied to what a campaign says. Honesty is one of the attributes that integrity gathers, and a candidate who deceives voters while asking for a position of public trust displays the defect the value exists to exclude. The ban has a content element and a mental-state element, and each has its own reason.

The content element exists because an election works only if voters choose on accurate information. Most voters cannot pull an opponent’s case files or sentencing records themselves, so they depend on what the candidates say, and a knowing falsehood does more than win votes: it corrupts the choice the election is meant to make. The word misleading extends the ban to the half-truth, a statement that is literally accurate but arranged so that listeners come away believing something false. Without that word, a candidate could deceive by selective omission and answer every charge by pointing to the literal truth of each sentence.

The mental-state element answers a different concern. Campaigns move fast and are full of claims about records, dates, and percentages, and anyone speaking at that volume will sometimes get a figure wrong. If every inaccuracy were a breach, candidates would hedge or fall silent about their opponents’ records, which is the speech voters most need, and they would risk sanctions that run from private reprimand to removal from office for an ordinary slip.¹⁴ The rule therefore reaches the speaker who knew the statement was false and the speaker who recklessly disregarded its truth, meaning one who published despite serious doubts or who avoided checking because a check might disprove the claim. An honest mistake is not enough, even when it damages the person it describes. The question to ask of any false statement is what the candidate knew when it was released, however wrong it turned out to be.

The lawyer-side rule on the same subject draws its line in the same place. Rule 8.2(a) of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct directs a lawyer not to make a statement that the lawyer “knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity” concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge or of a candidate for judicial office.¹⁵ Those words track the actual-malice standard of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, under which a public official may recover for a false statement about official conduct only on proof that it was made with knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.¹⁶ The reasons for the line explain why the candidate-side ban sits there too. Knowing or reckless accusations against judges and candidates erode public confidence in the administration of justice and make people of good character less willing to seek judicial office, yet honest, informed criticism of the bench is part of a free society, and lawyers are among the people best placed to offer it.¹⁷ A rule that punished honest error would also sit uneasily with the First Amendment standard just described, so a line at knowledge and recklessness lets the Code punish deliberate deception while leaving sincere criticism alone.

A stem that describes a damaging claim about an opponent invites the quick question whether the claim was true, and the text of the ban puts the decisive question elsewhere.

Both flyers contain a false statement about an opponent, so falsity cannot be what separates them. The difference lies in what each candidate knew, which is why the setting, the medium, and even the harm to the opponent do no work in the analysis. The same logic reaches the half-truth.

This ban meets the approval duty taught earlier at the moment the candidate reviews material before release. The review is when the candidate learns what a piece says and has the chance to check it. A candidate who approves a claim after being told it is baseless will struggle to deny knowledge, while a candidate who approves after checking the sources in good faith stands where Cole stands. Material released without any review breaches the approval duty whether or not its content proves accurate, and a false claim that a volunteer circulates independently engages the duty to take reasonable measures against supporters.

Pledges and Promises

Rule 4.1 forbids a judge or judicial candidate, in connection with cases, controversies, or issues likely to come before the court, to make pledges, promises, or commitments that are inconsistent with the impartial performance of the adjudicative duties of judicial office. The ban applies the duty to protect the judiciary’s impartiality¹⁹ to campaign promises. A pledge, in the sense the rule uses, is a vow to decide a type of case in a particular way, and a commitment is the same vow in softer words. The rule has three parts: a promise or commitment, a subject of cases or issues likely to reach the court, and a conflict with impartial adjudication.

The reason for the ban starts with what a litigant is owed. A hearing is worth something only if the person deciding it has not already settled the question, so a judge who promised to rule against drunk-driving defendants has decided part of every such case before the first witness is sworn. The defendant can still argue the facts but cannot change the one thing the judge committed in advance. A pledge also does something that a statement of belief does not, because it is offered to voters as the price of their votes. A candidate who tells the electorate how a category of cases will come out has traded future rulings for present support, which the independence value excludes, and has made voters, whom a judge must ignore when deciding an individual case, a constituency with a claim on the result. The subject-matter element fits these harms, since a promise about a matter that will never reach the court cannot bind any adjudication. The conflict element leaves a promise of fairness alone, because that promise commits the candidate to nothing beyond what impartial judging already demands.

Republican Party of Minnesota v. White marks the line between a prohibited commitment and a protected view. One court’s account of the case explains that the Supreme Court held Minnesota’s announce clause, a canon forbidding candidates for judicial election to announce their views on disputed legal and political issues, violated the First Amendment.²⁰ Minnesota defended the clause by invoking impartiality, so the Court asked what that word could mean. Read as a lack of bias for or against either party, which assures a litigant that the judge will apply the law to that litigant as to anyone else, impartiality was not served by a clause that restricted speech for or against particular issues, since a view on an issue says nothing about how a party will be treated. The Court also rejected the idea that a judge’s lack of predisposition about the relevant legal issues is a compelling state interest, and it stressed that debate on the qualifications of candidates is “at the core of our electoral process and of the First Amendment freedoms, not at the edges.”²¹

That analysis explains why the pledge rule is built around commitments and leaves announced views alone. A candidate’s opinion on how a statute should be read, or on whether a penalty is too lenient, addresses a legal or political question and tells a future litigant nothing about whether the law will be applied to that litigant as it is applied to everyone else. A vow to impose the maximum sentence on every defendant in a category addresses outcomes for a class of parties and tells each of them how the hearing will end. The rule reaches the vow and spares the view, and the work on an exam is to sort a candidate’s statements into one pile or the other.

The two drunk-driving answers share a subject, an audience, and a setting, so none of those facts can separate them. The decisive fact is whether the candidate has bound himself on outcomes. A belief that penalties are appropriate leaves a defendant free to persuade the judge, while the vow takes that chance away. The same sorting explains two categories of promise that the rule leaves open to every candidate.

Promises about judicial administration or court management are permitted because they concern how the court is run and say nothing about how any case is decided. A pledge to reduce a case backlog is the standard example. Adding calendars, speeding up scheduling, or improving the court’s technology changes the pace at which cases are heard and applies to every litigant in the same way, so no party gains or loses from the promise. Voters have a legitimate interest in hearing such proposals, since a judge elected to the bench will also be running a court.

Promises to act outside the courtroom are also permitted, and the standard examples are improving the jury selection system and renovating the courthouse. These promises concern what the judge will do away from the bench, in the community and in dealings with the bodies that fund and supervise the courts, and the judge’s adjudicative duties are not touched. A promise to work for a better jury system commits the candidate on no ruling, and neither promise gives any litigant a reason to expect a favorable result.

A promise’s label does not control, because the test looks at what the candidate has committed to do. A challenger who promises to cut the backlog by denying every continuance that a defendant requests has borrowed the vocabulary of administration, yet the promise binds her on a recurring ruling in a class of cases and favors one side before any motion is filed. That promise breaches the ban, while a vow to add evening calendars does not. A promise to treat every litigant fairly and to apply the law as written is likewise permitted, since it commits the candidate to nothing that impartial judging does not already require.

Two opposite errors recur on this topic. Some students treat any statement about a disputed legal issue as a forbidden pledge, which overlooks that the announce clause failed in White and that a view commits the candidate to no outcome. Others clear a promise because it sounds administrative, which overlooks that a vow to rule one way in a class of cases is a commitment about outcomes under whatever label it travels.

Pending Cases

The Model Code states the limit for sitting judges in Rule 2.10(A): a judge “shall not make any public statement that might reasonably be expected to affect the outcome or impair the fairness of a matter pending or impending in any court, or make any nonpublic statement that might substantially interfere with a fair trial or hearing.”²⁴ The campaign rules carry the same limit to a judicial candidate, so a candidate speaking from a podium, a television set, or a social media account is bound by it, consistent with the umbrella duty.²⁵ The ban protects two things at once: the fairness of the pending matter, and the appearance that a person who may become a judge has not taken sides in a dispute that someone else must decide.

Each part of the text does its own work. The standard asks whether a statement might reasonably be expected to affect the outcome or impair the fairness of a matter, which is an objective test about risk, so a violation does not require proof that a juror heard the remark, that a ruling changed, or that the speaker meant harm. The subject is a matter pending or impending, meaning a case already filed or one about to be, so a trial that has not yet begun is covered along with one under way. The reach extends to a matter pending in any court, and not only the court on which the speaker sits or hopes to sit. The text also sets two thresholds. A public statement is prohibited when it might reasonably be expected to affect outcome or fairness, while a nonpublic statement is prohibited only when it might substantially interfere with a fair trial or hearing. The heavier showing required for private words fits their smaller audience.

The reasons for the ban start with what a judge’s words carry. A judge’s statement arrives with the authority of the bench, and a public comment on a pending case can lend that authority to one side before the evidence is in. When the case is the judge’s own, the comment also makes the judge look as though sides were chosen prematurely or as though the judge were overly invested in the proceeding. The comment can then give the losing side a ground for a recusal motion, and that motion can end in a mistrial.²⁶ Behind these specific risks stands a long-held norm: to secure an impartial forum and assure the dignity of the judicial process, judges by and large must stay out of the fray, holding no press conferences about cases and no call-in programs to explain their rulings, and relying on their decisions to speak for themselves.²⁷

The reach to every court follows from how prejudice works. A television remark that a defendant is guilty can tilt a jury pool or pressure a witness in another county as readily as in the speaker’s own courtroom, and it does so with the added weight of a judicial title. Rule 2.10(A) therefore bars comment on matters pending before any court, in any jurisdiction.²⁸

Neither fact Dorsey might point to helps him. That the case is not in his court is irrelevant because the rule reaches any court, and that the setting was an interview is irrelevant because the rule reaches any public statement, whatever the channel. This ban is also separate from the pledge ban taught in the last section. The pledge ban concerns commitments about how kinds of cases will be decided, while this ban concerns statements about specific matters already pending or about to be, and a single remark, such as a vow to give one named defendant the maximum sentence, can breach both.

Two exceptions narrow the rule, and both follow from its purpose. Prohibited public statements do not include explanations of court procedure or statements made “in the course of official duties,” so the proscribed speech is limited to what judges say off the bench.²⁹ Rulings, orders, and opinions are how a court speaks about its own cases, and an account of how the court works informs the public without touching the merits of any dispute.

The label a speaker puts on a remark does not create a third exception. The Rule excludes explanations of court procedure and statements made in the course of official duties, and a remark labeled “off the record” is neither. A wish to correct the media’s account fares no better. Rule 2.10(E) lets a judge respond to allegations about the judge’s conduct in a matter, but only subject to paragraph (A), so a response is allowed when it satisfies (A) and forbidden when it does not.³⁰

In re Slaughter shows how hard the line can be to draw. It applied Texas canons whose wording differs from Model Code Rule 2.10(A), so it illustrates how a court reasons about a judge’s extrajudicial comment without settling how the Model Rule would treat the same posts. The Commission charged Judge Slaughter under two provisions: Canon 3(B)(10), the canon on comment about a pending proceeding, and Canon 4(A), on the theory that her extrajudicial Facebook activity cast reasonable doubt on her impartiality and led to her removal from a criminal case.³¹ Her removal ultimately led a successor judge to grant a mistrial in that case.³² One post read, “We have a big criminal trial starting Monday!” and after the trial began she posted two further comments calling it “the boy in a box case.”³³

The Commission criticized her use of the word “big” and the exclamation point as an effort to sensationalize the matter for self-aggrandizement, and defense counsel testified that the post raised concern that she might be unduly influenced by public opinion.³⁴ The Commission still offered no evidence that her statements would suggest to a reasonable person her probable decision in the case or cast reasonable doubt on her capacity to act impartially, and the court found its proof insufficient.³⁵ She explained that the later comments thanked the jurors for their service in a difficult case and described her day with a challenging defendant who spat on her and used profanity in the courtroom, and that she posted to keep a campaign promise of transparency. The court accepted that a reelection motive is not necessarily inconsistent with her duties as a judge.³⁶

The court nonetheless warned that extrajudicial comments about a pending proceeding will likely invite scrutiny. Clearing her posts took a great deal of time, energy, and expense, and such comments create a real possibility of recusal, or even a mistrial, and may detract from public trust and confidence in the administration of justice.³⁷ The promise of transparency explains why she posted, but it does not reduce what a comment on a pending case puts at risk. The first post reported that a trial was starting, and the court found no showing that it suggested her probable decision, which separates it from Dorsey’s remark. A judge who announces that a defendant is guilty has stated a view on the very question the trial must decide, while a judge who announces when a trial begins has revealed nothing about it.

Students lose points here in three ways. Some clear a comment because the case is in a different court or because the speaker is only a candidate, which ignores the rule’s reach to any court. Others clear a remark because it was off the record or true, which ignores that the rule tests the risk to the matter’s fairness and not the speaker’s label or accuracy. A third group treats every mention of a pending case as forbidden, which ignores that a remark reporting a schedule or explaining procedure creates no reasonable expectation of affecting the outcome.

Court Resources

Rule 4.1 forbids a judge or judicial candidate to use court staff, facilities, or other court resources in a campaign for judicial office. The first two terms are concrete: staff means the clerks, bailiffs, secretaries, and law clerks whom the court employs, and facilities means the courtrooms, chambers, and building the court occupies. The third term catches whatever else the public pays for, such as copiers, computers, postage, supplies, and official letterhead. The ban applies the duty to act consistently with the judiciary’s integrity, independence, and impartiality³⁹ to the courthouse itself. It rests most directly on integrity, because the forbidden conduct is the use of property held for the public to serve a private political aim.

Court staff and facilities belong to the public and exist to administer justice. Taxpayers, including those who will vote for the other candidate, pay the clerk’s salary and keep the lights on in the courtroom so that cases can be heard. A candidate who diverts them to a campaign collects a subsidy that no rival can match, since a challenger must pay for every hour of labor, every envelope, and every room out of contributions that are limited and publicly reported. The contest then turns partly on who controls public property, which distorts the election that the campaign rules exist to keep fair. A second harm comes from blurring. When litigants and voters see the court’s own employees and rooms working for a candidate, they cannot tell where the office stops and the campaign starts, so the court begins to look like an arm of the candidate’s political operation, and the appearance of independence and impartiality suffers even if no ruling is ever affected. This ban mirrors the ban on private benefit from campaign funds: that rule keeps money given for a race from being diverted to private ends, and this one keeps resources paid for by the public from being diverted to a race.

The two scenes involve the same task and the same mailers, so the task cannot be what separates them. The deciding fact is whose time, space, and equipment carried the work. Pratt drew on the county payroll, the courthouse, and the court’s postage meter, and each of those is a court resource, while Ruiz’s volunteers gave their own hours at an office the campaign paid for, so the public funded none of it. The same sorting applies to buildings: a candidate who hosts a rally in the ceremonial courtroom after hours has used a court facility, and one who rents a community hall has not. The time of day, the brevity of the task, and the clerical character of the work do not enter the analysis, because the ban looks to the source of what the campaign used.

The temptation arises mainly for sitting judges, who alone control a staff and a building, and the ban reaches beyond the judge’s own hands. A campaign manager who runs flyers through the chambers copier acts on the candidate’s behalf in a way the candidate may not, so the duty to take reasonable measures against supporters taught earlier applies, and a candidate who learns of it and says nothing is exposed. Two opposite slips recur on exams. Some students clear the conduct because it was small, after hours, or clerical, which overlooks that the ban tests the use of the resource and not its value or its timing. Others read the ban as a general restriction on campaign logistics, which overlooks that it reaches only court resources; a campaign remains free to use its own volunteers, its own office, and its own money within the other rules.