(TargetLiberty.org) There is a growing call for the spouses of Supreme Court justices to have to follow stricter ethics rules. The call for additional ethics requirements for judges and their families has grown following the attention recently received by Jane Roberts, the spouse of Chief Justice John Roberts.
Roberts was part of a recent ethics complaint filed by a former colleague last month, which noted that her legal recruiting work had often included firms with business before the court, but that the chief justice had never recused himself from these cases.
However, even in the legal world, many are not convinced whether the case of Roberts has any “meaningful ethics” implications.
However, that is not the case in relation to Ginni Thomas, the spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas, who was involved in the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Thomas had come under a lot of criticism for his wife’s support of overturning the elections.
Still, while Roberts’s case is not as serious, it has led to an increase in the public’s calls for greater accountability in the Supreme Court.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the new reports about Roberts’s wife “Example #4,394” of why there should be strict ethics codes that Justices and their families need to abide by. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) also supported the call for an ethics code for justices.
Recently the American Bar Association (ABA) also voted in favor of a binding code of ethics for justices, this helped increase the momentum of the call. Tom Fitzpatrick, who was key in drafting the resolution, said that the “legal profession” for the first time was calling for “the U.S. Supreme Court (to) adopt a binding code of ethics.”
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