The Supreme Court’s code of conduct is a good first step
FOR 50 years all but nine of America’s around 2,000 federal judges have been subject to a code of conduct laying out ethical guidelines for jurists’ behaviour on and off the bench. On November 13th the exceptions—the justices of the Supreme Court—announced that they had decided to join their lower-court peers.
The new rules do not arrive in a vacuum. Calls for the court to clean up its act have followed investigative reports from ProPublica and other publications uncovering several justices’ ethical lapses. Justice Clarence Thomas, the main target of those articles, failed to declare decades of luxury travel on the tab of Harlan Crow, a generous donor to conservative causes. Mr Crow also bought a home Justice Thomas owned in Georgia and footed the tuition bill for his grandnephew’s private school.
A Senate committee found last month that another friend of Justice Thomas apparently forgave “a substantial portion” of a $267,230 loan financing the justice’s Prevost Marathon motor coach (which he has referred to as his “land yacht”). This too was not declared. And although his wife Virginia lobbied President Donald Trump’s chief of staff to help overturn the 2020 election outcome, Justice Thomas opted not to recuse himself from cases challenging the election results and involving Mr Trump’s role in the riot at the Capitol on January 6th 2021.
2023-11-15 16:09:30
Original from www.economist.com
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