# Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. **556 U.S. 868 (2009).** The only Supreme Court decision placing a constitutional floor under recusal in an elected judiciary, and the case the entire judicial-election money debate is argued around. ## Holding The chief executive of a coal company facing a $50 million verdict spent roughly $3 million supporting a candidate for the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals — more than the candidate's own campaign and all other supporters combined — while the appeal was pending. The candidate won and then declined to recuse himself from the case, voting twice to overturn the verdict. In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that the **Due Process Clause** required recusal: where a litigant's campaign support creates a "serious risk of actual bias," the Constitution demands the judge step aside, whether or not the judge is in fact biased and whether or not any state recusal rule was violated. ## Why it is a thinner floor than it sounds The majority went out of its way to confine the holding to the extraordinary case, describing the facts as extreme and rare. That framing is the whole of the doctrinal problem: a standard pitched at the outlier does not obviously reach the ordinary modern judicial race, in which eight-figure and now nine-figure outside spending is routine rather than exceptional. Chief Justice Roberts's dissent listed forty unanswered questions about where the line would fall, and most of them remain unanswered. ## See also - [[State Judicial Selection Crosswalk]] - [[Republican Party of Minnesota v. White]] - [[Citizens United v. FEC]] - [[Judicial Independence]] - [[Dark Money]]