The Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee issued an opinion last month stating that it would violate the Code of Judicial Conduct  for a judge to “add lawyers who may appear before the judge as ‘friends’ on a social networking site, and permit such lawyers to add the judge as their ‘friend’.”  You can read the opinion here.

I was curious to see if the Washington Courts or the Washington State Bar Association has issued any opinions on this topic.  I searched the Judicial Ethics Opinions from the Ethics Advisory Committee for the State of Washington but did not see that Washington has issued an ethics opinion that is similiar to the one from Florida.  I did find an opinion addressing the question of whether or not a judge could maintain a internet blog (Opinion 09-05).  The short answer is yes, with the proper disclaimers.

I also searched the WSBA Ethics Opinions but didn’t find anything that matched.  Nonetheless, it’s still probably not a good idea to ‘friend’ your favorite judge.