Despite facing criticism from GOP lawmakers, a pricey Hawaiian judicial conference attended by lawyers, judges and two Supreme Court justices took place this past weekend.

The 9^th Circuit conference, held in Maui (which is, indeed, in the 9^th Circuit, after all) drew the ire of Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who balked at the meeting’s $1 million price tab and urged Chief Judge Alex Kozinski to call the whole thing off, the Washington Examiner reports.

But in a letter to the lawmakers last week, Kozinski said that it was too late to cancel the event without facing pricey penalties, and because many of the event’s attendees – which included Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. – had already purchased nonrefundable tickets.

“In hindsight, had we foreseen the nation’s current fiscal problems, we may have chosen a different site for this year’s conference,” Kozinski wrote to the senators, adding that future conferences will be held in California, closer to where most judges live. More on this weekend’s program from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2012 at 6:50 am and is filed under Anthony Kennedy, Federal Courts, Samuel Alito, Supreme Court. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.