A day after President Biden used an Oval Office address to promise Supreme Court reform, liberal Justice Elena Kagan urged ethics reforms, with a concrete enforcement mechanism.
At the Ninth Circuit Court’s annual judicial conference in Sacramento, California, the Justice answered a question on the difficulties of enforcing an ethics code, especially in deciding who to task with such a responsibility.
“I feel as though we, however hard it is, that we could and should try to figure out some mechanism for doing this,” Kagan said, per Bloomberg Law.
Kagan, who once mused whether accepting a care package of bagels would violate ethics laws, said Chief Justice John Roberts ought to consider creating “some sort of committee of highly respected judges with a great deal of experience and a reputation for fairness” to combat the court’s growing image of corruption.
The Supreme Court has faced eroding public confidence following not only a slate of deeply divisive and unprecedented decisions, but also allegations of political extremism and bias, personal conflict, and financial misconduct against Justices.
Justice Clarence Thomas’ lavish yacht trips, generously over-market home sale, and other connections to billionaire benefactors drew attention towards court reforms, a mission that even picked up the support of President Biden.
Kagan, who joined the court in 2010, is one of three liberal justices who spent the year penning blistering dissents as her colleagues torched regulatory power, stripped away rights for unhoused people, and granted presidents near-absolute immunity.
In a separate panel, Kagan also criticized the practice of writing multiple concurring opinions in a case, including Justice Thomas’s concurrence in a Presidential Immunity case creating a novel legal theory against the use of special prosecutors, a rationale used by Judge Aileen Cannon to dismiss a case against Donald Trump.
“It prevents us, I think, from giving the kind of guidance that lower courts have a right to expect, that the public has a right to expect,” Kagan reportedly said.
Kagan also drew attention to the seven separate decisions in United States v. Rahimi, a case from this term which held 8-1 that bans on firearm ownership for domestic abusers were legal.
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