Million-dollar judicial getaway irks US senators

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

The 9th Circuit conference, held in Maui (which is, indeed, in the 9th 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 Kennedy and Justice Samuel 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.