US supreme court announces ethics code amid pressure over gift scandals

The justices said 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’. Photograph: Fred Schilling/Collection of the Supreme Court/AFP/Getty Images

The US supreme court has finally responded to mounting pressure over a spate of ethics scandals engulfing some of its senior rightwing justices by publishing its first ever code that sets out the “rules and principles that guide the conduct of members of the court”.

The 14-page document follows months of increasingly sharp criticism of the justices and their failure to apply to themselves basic ethical rules that bind all other judges in the US. Even as they released the code, however, the justices maintained their defensive posture, insisting in a brief statement that the furore of recent months had been a “misunderstanding”.