this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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US Supreme Court announces formal ethics code for justices (www.reuters.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by memfree@beehaw.org to c/usnews@beehaw.org
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The code contains sections codifying that justices should not allow outside relationships to influence their official conduct or judgment, placing restrictions on justices participating in fundraising and reiterating limits on the accepting of gifts. It also states that justices should not "to any substantial degree" use their judicial resources or staff to engage in non-official activities.

Note that it sounds like this has NOT been officially adopted yet and so far there is no obvious means of enforcement.

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/us/politics/supreme-court-ethics-code.html

Edit: Politco has posted the PDF of the "CODE OF CONDUCT FOR JUSTICES OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES"

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[–] Fauxreigner@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

From the opening page

The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice. The absence of a Code, however, 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. 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.

So...

  1. Why, if you think the code that applies to all other federal judges is good, did you not simply adopt it?
  2. So the problem is that people think the justices consider them not bound by ethics rules because they don't have a formal code, not the behaviors of certain justices that have come to light in recent years, got it.