The Supreme Court finally has a code of ethics. Will it matter?

By codifying an existing amalgam of rules and standards, justices hope they can correct any 'misunderstanding' about their roles on the bench

Supreme Court justices with halos
Perhaps most crucial is not what the document contains, but what it omits: any mechanism for ensuring the guidelines are followed.
(Image credit: Illustrated / Getty Images)

The United States Supreme Court on Monday took the rare and extraordinary step of addressing external criticism of its ordinarily deeply private workings, announcing it had issued a "Code of Conduct" for its justices in a one-sentence press release, capping off months of debate, defiance, and a steady drip-drip-drop of scandalous disclosures (and lack thereof) over various ethical concerns for the traditionally unassailable members of the court. 

As the court stressed in a brief preamble to the code, the 15-page guidelines are not a new set of rules being imposed upon a previously unconstrained bench of justices. Instead, the body had long been operating under the "equivalent of common law ethics rules" that were "derived from a variety of sources" — the code is merely the "codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct" in the hopes of clearing up any "misunderstanding" over what, if any, guidelines applied to the most powerful jurists in the nation. 

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Rafi Schwartz, The Week US

Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.