The Supreme Court said Monday it is adopting a code of conduct in an attempt to bolster the public’s confidence in the court after months of news stories alleging that some of the justices have been skirting ethics regulations.
In a brief statement the justices said that the code is “substantially derived” from an existing code of conduct that applies to the lower court but has been adapted to the “unique institutional setting of the Supreme Court.
However, the justices fail to explain how the code would work, who would enforce it, and acknowledged they had more work to do, including on financial disclosures.
The court acknowledged it might need additional resources to “perform initial and ongoing review of recusal and other ethics issues.”
The absence of a code “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules,” the justices said in a statement. “To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”
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