Courts

We've Entered The 'Hopes And Wishes' Phase Of SCOTUS Accountability

A judge loses their wig each time we get one of these half-baked commitments to change.

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Supreme Court Holds Investiture Ceremony For Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

(Photo by Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)

The U.S. Supreme Court acts as the court of last resort for some of our nation’s most pressing issues: cakes, bodies of water, you get the idea. Flowing from the force and finality of their station, you’d expect Supreme Court justices to be the best examples of what the vocation has to offer: neutral, draped in decorum, and accountable. You’d also be wrong. Within the last two years, the number of pressing Supreme Court ethical debacles have outpaced the number of Fast and Furious movies. Indeed, we’d need a commitment to righting our highest court’s wrongs that rivals the strength of Dominic. Here’s him flipping a car. Instead, we get feeble aspirations from one of the Court’s most junior members. From ABA Journal:

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Thursday the U.S. Supreme Court is continuing to work on ethics issues, and he is “hopeful there will be some concrete steps.”

Are you serious? Hoping for “concrete steps” is good enough if you have a judge that cursed at person who double parked, but when you have a Supreme Court whose members have been repeat offenders, one for decades, that is not the time for a tasteful understatement. Immediately after Chief Justice Roberts released a scout’s honor pledge for everyone to do better on their own because they have no masters, Clarence and Alito messed that up. He’s talking about increasing public confidence as if it is difficult when it really isn’t. Here’s a blueprint:

  1. Stop taking anywhere within the range of a hundred thousand to millions of dollars in under-the-table money from… anybody.
  2. Do your damned disclosures accurately and on time. As a whole, you people condemned a legally innocent man to hard time over what amounts to a paperwork-cutting heuristic. It really isn’t asking much of you to submit your paperwork in a timely fashion.
  3. Recuse yourself from cases that bring about even the appearance of impropriety. It really shouldn’t be a teeth-pulling exercise to get Alito to recuse himself from a case where a lawyer who interviewed him at his Substack is representing a client.

It really is that simple — pull a Nancy Reagan whenever you’re tempted to take dirty money and do your paperwork! After that, we can get to not being accused of sexual assault or clearly being partisan hacks, but a great deal of confidence could be gained by just doing the jobs you’ve been hired to do the way that you are supposed to do them.

Justice Kavanaugh Says He’s Hopeful For ‘Concrete Steps’ On SCOTUS Ethics Matters [ABA Journal]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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