Black robe; there's one group of criminals judges still go easy on: themselves.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie

Helen Guercio had been a clerical worker in the Detroit courts for 45 years, so she had a pretty good idea of how the system worked. And lately, federal bankruptcy judge Harry Hackett's cases didn't seem to fit it.

Guercio, who worked for another bankruptcy judge, had noticed that Hackett was drawing nearly all the court's large corporate bankruptcy cases--an oddity, since such cases were supposedly doled out at random. Moreover, most of these cases were being argued by one prominent bankruptcy lawyer, Irving August. After peering more closely into the court's financial records, Guercio also discovered that Hackett, who determined lawyers' fees in such cases, was awarding August what seemed to be excessively high payments.

It looked to Guercio like a case of kickbacks, but, still, she was just a secretary. So she took the evidence to the chief district judge, who was responsible for ruling on allegations of foul play. Her complaints soon disappeared unanswered into the abyss of the court system.

Guercio had logged enough experience in the labyrinthine legal system to know there was a second way to get charges heard. She'd break protocol and bypass the Detroit judiciary altogether, taking her suspicions to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, an agency set up by Congress in 1980 to make sure complaints like hers don't get muzzled. Reaching a staff attorney in the bankruptcy division, Milner Benedict, she unloaded her fears.

Benedict listened, and then went to work. When the dust settled several months later, Guercio's uneasiness had proved founded. August had been sleeping with the clerk in charge of the blind draw and paying her off for ensuring that his big cases were handled by Hackett. As for Hackett, the investigators unearthed compelling evidence--like the fact that August had paid for trips taken by the judge and his girlfriend--that in return for awarding August cushy fees, the judge was taking a cut for himself. But while August was eventually sent to jail, Hackett simply retired at the end of his term--in good enough standing to have a courthouse dedicated to him in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Guercio didn't fare as well. A few years later, after raising questions about another judge, she was fired.

In the annals of the American judiciary, the Detroit case is atypical--not just because of the corruption, but because that corruption was investigated and exposed. Thanks to two decades of reforms, including the Freedom of Information Act and an explosion in the number of government investigators, the executive and legislative branches have come under closer scrutiny. But the judicial branch remains accountable to virtually no one but itself.

Not so fast, you say: We know what movies Robert Bork rents from the local Blockbuster Video, we know when Douglas Ginsburg got stoned, and many of us know more about Clarence Thomas than we can stomach. Indeed, after the Thomas hearings, politicians began complaining that there's too much public scrutiny of judges--and suggesting that the press and Congress and the lawyers should all lighten up.

But there's something this panorama of recent judicial inquiry doesn't take into account: All the klieg lights and interrogations are reserved for just nine of America's nearly 30,000 judges, the Brethren. Below them, the rules of the game are not only different, but written and implemented almost exclusively by other judges and the lawyers whose careers depend on them. While investigations of the judges who break those rules tend to be few and far between, lawyers and other observers who do complain are at best ignored and at worst punished for daring a point a finger. And even when the evidence against a judge is overwhelming, punishment tends to be of the wristslap variety.

Needless to say, the stakes here are enormous: While Supreme Court justices hear fewer than 130 cases a year, the federal courts alone hear more than 30,000 annually, and in the process create the bulk of the law of the land. Judges have one hell of a...