FRIENDS OF THE COURT

Wife of Judge on Mifepristone Case Was Paid by Anti-Abortion Group

The wife of James Ho, one of the circuit judges who banned mifepristone last year, took multiple payments from the group that brought it to court.

The fate of the abortion pill mifepristone is now before the Supreme Court, after a fifth-circuit appeals panel of three judges ruled against its distribution last summer. According to a new report, the wife of one of those judges—James Ho, a Trump appointee who previously served as the solicitor general of Texas—took at least six payments between 2018 and 2022 from the conservative legal group that brought the case to court. The Guardian reports that the payments to Allyson Ho don’t technically violate the court’s code of conduct, but experts warned they do not help with public trust in the legal system. “When Americans see a case like this—so clearly concocted and motivated by special interests, and with evident connections between those interests and the judges on the case, it does tremendous damage to the reputation of the courts,” Alex Aronson, the executive director of the nonpartisan group Court Accountability, told the newspaper. James Ho said he “consulted our court’s ethics advisor prior to sitting in that case, and was advised that there was no basis for recusal. In any event, my wife’s practice is to donate honoraria to charity.”