David Lat and Zachary Shemtob on Judicial Ethics in a Populist Age

In 2023, Supreme Court justices made news not only for the cases decided but also for their personal conduct. As David Lat and Zach Shemtob noted in an article for The Atlantic, the news stories often involved “financial entanglements between justices and wealthy benefactors.” As Lat and Shemtob discuss with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, the intensity of the public response to the justices’ behavior is more noteworthy than the
underlying conduct. They attribute the strong reaction to our current political era, which is not only hyper-partisan but anti-elitist as well. Lat and Shemtob discuss their article, the Supreme Court’s adoption of an ethics code in late 2023, and how concerns over the justices' ethics relate to the current Supreme Court term in this Touro Law Review podcast.