Pressure is rising on the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. On its face, this sounds reasonable. What’s not to like about ethics? But it’s worth asking what problem the change would solve.
If adopting an ethics code is meant to be symbolic — signaling that no one, not even the justices, is above the law — then it might have some value.
But if the point is to subject the justices to practical oversight and supervision, an ethics code would probably fall short. The justices would likely end up supervising themselves. Justices are already required by law to recuse themselves where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did earlier this year in the Harvard University affirmative action case. As a practical matter, a code might encourage politicized harassment of the justices without truly subjecting them to any real source of external authority.
