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The US Supreme Court has adopted its first code of conduct, a landmark move following reports about some justices’ undisclosed relationships with powerful figures that sparked a fraught debate around oversight of the country’s most powerful bench.
The court on Monday released the code, which it said was “substantially derived” from guidelines applied to other US federal judges.
“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 court said. “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.”
The rules come after ProPublica, the investigative journalism site, reported earlier this year that conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had failed to disclose gifts and luxury travel for years.
The revelations plunged the court into an ethical crisis and triggered calls for the adoption of a code of conduct from critics who argued justices had faced virtually no oversight for decades. Under US law, justices are required to file financial disclosure forms revealing investments and other sources of income, significant gifts and reimbursement for expenses such as travel and lodging.
The justices have defended their actions. Alito in June said there was “no obligation” to recuse himself from cases involving Paul Singer, a prominent conservative fund manager who has won favourable rulings from the Supreme Court, after joining him on a luxury fishing trip to an Alaskan salmon lodge in 2008.
ProPublica also revealed details of Thomas’s close friendship with Republican political donor Harlan Crow, including the justice travelling on the billionaire’s private jet and joining him on holidays in Indonesia and his Adirondacks estate in upstate New York. Thomas has denied any wrongdoing in connection with the trips.
The code prohibits justices from allowing relationships to “influence official conduct or judgment,” and they must disqualify themselves from proceedings if their impartiality “might reasonably be questioned” by matters such as personal bias or financial interest. Justices must also comply with restrictions on accepting gifts that were tightened earlier this year by the federal courts’ policymaker.
Gabe Roth, executive director at Fix the Court, an advocacy group, said the code still left “much to be desired”, since there was no way for an outside party to file a complaint against a justice.
“If the nine [justices] are going to release an ethics code with no enforcement mechanism and remain the only police of the nine, then how can the public trust they’re going to do anything more than simply cover for one another, ethics be damned?” he said in a statement.
Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator who chairs the Senate judiciary committee and has called for a Supreme Court ethics code for more than a decade, said the rules marked “a step in the right direction”, but “may fall short of the ethical standards which other federal judges are held to, and that’s unacceptable”.
He argued that under the code, many decisions were left to justices’ discretion, such as when to recuse from hearing a case, and that there appeared to be no “meaningful enforcement mechanism to hold justices accountable for any violations of the code”.
Earlier this year the Senate judiciary committee launched an ethics investigation into the court. The committee in July advanced a bill that would require a code of conduct, public explanations for recusal decisions and a process to investigate alleged misconduct.
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