Judicial ethics in the spotlight

In case you missed it, the court released the of three summer order lists on Monday and announced that it will hear argument during the 2026-27 term in Jouppi v. Alaska, an Alaskan bush pilot’s challenge to the forfeiture of his $95,000 airplane over a six-pack of beer. The second summer order list is scheduled to be released on Aug. 17.

Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, has reintroduced “a trio of bills that would crack down on conflicts of interest and allow public records requests into the federal judiciary, as part of a push to increase transparency in the federal courts,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Two of the bills aim to prevent Supreme Court justices and lower court judges from handling litigation in which they have a financial interest. The measures would expand conflicts of interest rules that apply to the executive branch to the judiciary and require justices and judges to put certain financial assets in a blind trust.” “The Democrat-led bills face slim odds of passage in the Republican-controlled Congress,” but they add to an already active debate over “strengthening ethics rules for the judiciary.” Bloomberg Law noted that “[l]awmakers pressed Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett on the high court ethics code during the justices’ appearances before House and Senate spending committee panels on July 14.”

On Monday, President Donald Trump “signed orders to impose a 50 percent tariff on a wide range of Canadian goods, … including wine, hockey sticks, cement, dairy products, plywood, paper and furniture,” according to The New York Times. “The new tariffs will be imposed under an obscure legal provision, Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which Congress wrote as the Great Depression deepened. The law allows the president to put tariffs of up to 50 percent on imports from countries that discriminate against U.S. commerce uniquely, as compared to other countries.” “Administration officials said the taxes were punishment for Canadian discrimination against three U.S. industries: motor vehicles, dairy and alcohol.” The New York Times noted that the Trump “administration is preparing to issue more global tariffs, perhaps as soon as this week,” as it continues to rebuild the tariff regime struck down by the Supreme Court in February.

In a post for his Substack, Jesse Wegman explored the Brennan Center’s “new memo on Supreme Court term limits,” which “makes the case for why Congress has the power” under the Constitution’s necessary and proper clause “to institute term limits through federal statute, no constitutional amendment required.” Congress could impose “18-year terms for justices, followed by a shift to senior status. Senior justices would no longer sit on the nine-member Court. Instead, their duties would change to include sitting by designation on lower federal courts.” “When Congress was in the business of actually using its legislative powers over the Supreme Court, it relied on [the necessary and proper] clause all the time: to set the number of justices, or the Court’s jurisdiction, or the timing of its term, and so on,” Wegman observed, contending that “court reformers should see the Constitution as a friend, not a foe.”

In a post for his Substack, Chris Geidner highlighted the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit’s decision “to have the full court review the constitutionality of the federal ban on firearm possession by a person previously convicted of a felony” under the commerce clause, rather than the Second Amendment. The announcement comes after Justice Clarence Thomas called for lower courts to take up that question in his solo concurrence in . Indeed, 5th Circuit Judge Stephen Higginson pointed to Thomas as the inspiration behind his colleagues’ order in his opinion dissenting from the order granting rehearing en banc. Geidner, echoing Higginson, described the 5th Circuit’s order as “a wild escalation of how quickly courts are seeking to move the law rapidly to the right.”

In a column for The Atlantic, Aziz Huq reflected on the Roberts court’s relationship with the Trump administration, contending that the court’s rulings against two of President Donald Trump’s “signature policy initiatives, birthright citizenship and global tariffs,” stem not from “a moderate turn” or “sense of true independence,” but from the president’s departure from the court’s “constitutional vision.” That vision, according to Huq, includes “transform[ing] the First Amendment” to reduce restrictions on campaign spending and religious practices, “eviscerat[ing] the equal-protection clause, and recalibrat[ing] the Constitution’s balance of powers” by giving the executive branch more power. “The lesson for the White House from this term is not that the Court is suddenly an adversary,” Huq wrote. “It is that the justices have little patience for impulsive, erratic swerves by a president who will be gone in three years, especially when accommodating his whims undermines their longer-term constitutional vision.”