Utah Supreme Court Justice Diana Hagen resigned effective immediately Friday after months of mounting pressure over allegations she carried on an improper relationship with an attorney who argued a high-profile redistricting case before her court. The resignation, first reported by the Daily Caller, ends a tenure marked by one of the most consequential, and now most compromised, state court decisions in recent memory.
Hagen submitted her letter to Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who confirmed the departure in a brief statement. The attorney at the center of the allegation is David Reymann, who represented the League of Women Voters of Utah in a lawsuit challenging the state's 2021 congressional map.
That case was no small matter. The Utah Supreme Court nullified the Republican-led legislature's redistricting moves in 2024, and Hagen herself wrote the opinion. A lower-court judge named Gibson later ruled the 2021 map had to be redrawn entirely. The allegation that the justice who authored that opinion was personally entangled with an attorney on the winning side strikes at the foundation of the ruling's legitimacy.
The complaint arrived at the Judicial Conduct Commission in December 2025, filed through an attorney by Hagen's ex-husband. The allegation: that Hagen had an improper relationship with Reymann, who had appeared before the court in the redistricting litigation.
The JCC investigated and dismissed the complaint. Its decision called the allegations "speculative, overstated, and misleading" and said the ex-husband's claims carried "very little credibility." Hagen, for her part, denied any conflict of interest, said she had reported herself to the JCC, and submitted a sworn statement.
But that did not settle the matter. The Utah Supreme Court itself issued a statement saying Hagen had last involved herself in the redistricting case in October 2024 and had recused herself from the case "after she reconnected with a number of old friends in the spring of 2025." The court added that her ex-husband's allegations "postdate her involvement in League of Women Voters."
Read that timeline carefully. The court's own account concedes that Hagen "reconnected" with unnamed old friends, a category that apparently includes Reymann, months after she wrote the opinion that upended Utah's congressional maps. The recusal came only after that reconnection, not before the ruling.
The JCC's dismissal did not satisfy Utah's top Republican officials. In April, Gov. Cox, Republican House Speaker Mike Schultz, and Republican Senate President J. Stuart Adams announced they would pursue an additional investigation into the allegation. State leaders pushed for answers the conduct commission had declined to provide.
That investigation now appears moot. Hagen resigned before it could proceed further. The Washington Examiner reported that Hagen stepped down less than four years after her appointment, under escalating pressure from Republican leadership.
Questions about judicial ethics and conflicts of interest have become a recurring theme across the federal and state judiciary. A recent misconduct complaint targeting a federal judge over alleged coordination with the Biden DOJ underscores how seriously the public now scrutinizes the independence of the bench.
Salt Lake Tribune journalist Robert Gehrke shared the text of Hagen's resignation letter. In it, Hagen framed her departure as a sacrifice for her family, not an admission of wrongdoing.
As Breitbart reported, Hagen opened the letter bluntly:
"It is with deep sadness that I tender my immediate resignation as a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court."
She went on to say that her family had not chosen public life and did not deserve the scrutiny that followed:
"They do not deserve to have intensely personal details surrounding the painful dissolution of my thirty-year marriage subjected to public scrutiny."
Hagen also wrote that she could not continue serving "without sacrificing the privacy and well-being of those I care about and the effective functioning and independence of Utah's judiciary." The Washington Times noted that Hagen expressed a desire to keep serving but concluded the personal cost was too high.
The letter expressed sadness and regret over the suddenness of her departure and the disruption it could cause. What it did not contain was a direct denial of the relationship itself, only a denial that any conflict of interest tainted her judicial work.
To understand why this resignation matters beyond one justice's personal conduct, you have to understand the case at the center of it. Utah voters approved a proposition creating an independent commission to draw the state's congressional maps. The Republican-controlled legislature moved to downgrade and set aside that citizen-approved measure. Lawmakers also attempted to amend the state constitution to grant themselves the power to repeal the proposition outright.
The Utah Supreme Court struck down those legislative moves in 2024, in an opinion Hagen authored. The League of Women Voters of Utah was among the plaintiff groups that brought the challenge, and David Reymann was their attorney.
Redistricting battles have become a flashpoint nationwide. In Tennessee, Republicans recently redrew a Memphis congressional district after a separate court ruling forced their hand. The stakes in these fights are enormous: they determine which party holds structural advantages in congressional elections for a decade.
In Utah, the allegation that the justice who wrote the opinion striking down Republican redistricting efforts was personally involved with an attorney on the opposing side raises an obvious question: Was the fix in? The JCC said no. State Republican leaders were not convinced. And now the justice who could have answered under oath has walked away from the bench instead.
Hagen's departure hands Gov. Cox the power to appoint her replacement. As Just The News reported, the vacancy gives Cox an opportunity to shift the court's ideological balance, a significant opening in a state where the judiciary has recently clashed with the Republican legislature on redistricting and legislative authority.
Cox, a Republican, thanked Hagen for her service in his brief statement but offered no signal about a timeline for naming a successor.
The broader question of judicial vacancies and who fills them has taken on new urgency at every level of government. At the federal level, President Trump has signaled his readiness to fill multiple Supreme Court seats as retirement speculation grows. In Utah, the stakes are more immediate: a single appointment could reshape how the state's highest court handles legislative power, redistricting, and the boundaries of direct democracy.
Several facts remain unclear. The exact nature of the alleged relationship between Hagen and Reymann has not been publicly detailed beyond the word "affair." The specific content of Hagen's sworn statement to the JCC has not been disclosed. And the additional investigation that Cox, Schultz, and Adams announced in April, who would conduct it, what authority it would carry, and what it might have uncovered, now appears to have been overtaken by Hagen's resignation.
The JCC's dismissal of the complaint and the court's own defensive statement tried to draw a clean line: the relationship, whatever it was, came after the ruling. But the court's own language, that Hagen recused herself after "reconnecting" with old friends in spring 2025, leaves open the question of when exactly that reconnection began, what form it took, and whether it had any roots in the period when Hagen was actively deciding the case.
Hagen denied a conflict. The conduct commission backed her up. Republican leaders did not buy it. And Hagen chose to resign rather than face a deeper inquiry.
The integrity of courts depends on more than outcomes. It depends on the public's confidence that no thumb sat on the scale. When a justice who wrote a landmark redistricting opinion turns out to have had undisclosed personal ties to an attorney on the winning side, and then resigns under pressure rather than face a full accounting, that confidence takes a hit no resignation letter can repair.
Courts that demand transparency from legislators ought to be willing to endure the same standard themselves. Hagen asked for privacy. Utah's voters deserved answers.
