The conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett has said she and her colleagues should be subject to a code of ethics, following a series of scandals that have dented public confidence in the nation’s highest bench.
The Donald Trump appointee was speaking on Monday at a sometimes raucous discussion at the University of Minnesota law school, the New York Times reported.
Accusations of malfeasance and corruption have swirled around two associate justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, for months, prompting calls from legal watchdogs and others for their resignation, or for Chief Justice John Roberts to force their recusal from certain cases.
Barrett, speaking in Minneapolis to the law professor Robert Stein, a former chief operating officer of the American Bar Association, said she now favored the implementation of ethics rules similar to those that govern less senior members of the judiciary.
“It would be a good idea for us to do it, particularly so that we can communicate to the public exactly what it is that we are doing in a clearer way,” she said.
“All nine justices are very committed to the highest standards of ethical conduct.”
Her words about her colleagues’ morals echo those of Roberts, who insisted in May at an awards dinner in Washington DC that ensuring the panel exhibited exemplary conduct was his biggest priority.
“I want to assure people that I am committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct,” he said.
But while he told attendees at that dinner that the justices were “continuing to look at the things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment”, no formal proposal or guidelines have emerged.
And while Barrett said on Monday she wanted to see such a code, she also said she could not offer a timeline, or any details of what it might contain.
Alito, meanwhile, appears the most resistant to ethics rules. He said in July, amid speculation that the Senate judiciary committee was in the process of drawing up guidelines, that Congress had “no authority to regulate the supreme court, period”. It drew a rebuke from the Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy that Alito was “stunningly wrong”.
Another Democratic senator, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, filed a formal ethics complaint to the committee last month against Alito, who along with Thomas is alleged to have accepted undeclared gifts and luxury travel from a number of wealthy donors.
Public confidence in the supreme court remains at its lowest in generations. Since the three conservative justices installed by the Trump administration cemented a hard-right majority for the panel, it has made several widely unpopular rulings, including overturning almost half a century of federal abortion rights last year.
In a 2022 poll, reported in May, only 18% of Americans said they had a great deal of confidence in the court, down from 26% in 2021, and 36% said they had hardly any, up from 21%.
Barrett’s event in Minneapolis, attended by more than 2,500 people, was interrupted by a protest against the court’s 2022 reversal of the Roe v Wade ruling that had secured women’s access to abortion since 1973. Activists waving banners with messages including “Abort the court” and “Defend affirmative action” were removed from the public gallery, the Times reported.
Barrett claimed that despite deep ideological divisions, the six conservative and three liberal justices enjoyed a collegial working environment.
“The fire gets put on the page, but it is not expressed in interpersonal relationships,” she said. “We are in the building with each other. Justices have lunch every day that we have oral argument and every day after conference.”
She also said she had personally arranged for a Broadway singer to serenade the panel’s newest member, the liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, at a welcome party last year after discovering her love of the musical Hamilton.
