Judges can recuse themselves sua sponte or do so-or decline to do so-if a party moves for disqualification. The Disqualification Statute provides that “any justice judge … shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned” as well as in more specific, mostly financial, instances. Unlike in lower courts, no one can sit in for justices who have recused themselves.”īut Congress has imposed recusal rules. For one example, a CNN analyst stated “There is no formal rule for when judges should recuse themselves.” For another, the Washington Post editorialized “that Congress should impose strict ethics rules on Supreme Court justices. Many commentators on the Thomas affair have overlooked the federal Disqualification Statute. To understand the recusal matter, it helps first to understand the two main judicial misconduct statutes. The imbroglio may, however, reawaken interest in a legislative proposal that surfaced a decade ago during previous recusal controversies. Whether to recuse is a judicial decision, reviewable only by a higher court, and there’s no court higher than the Supreme Court. In fact, none of the proposals currently tossed about would affect recusal decisions. The revelations produced demands for his recusal in upcoming cases and rekindled calls for applying tougher ethical codes to the high court-calls that often reflect shaky understandings of the arcane regime of federal judicial ethics regulation and probably confuse those trying to make sense of it.

Nonresident Senior Fellow - Governance Studies

Supreme court justice photo