Justice Elena Kagan says Supreme Court’s code of conduct needs an enforcement plan. Takeaways from her wide-ranging comments.

Sacramento, California CNN —

Justice Elena Kagan on Thursday defended the code of conduct the Supreme Court created last year, but conceded there needs to be a way to enforce the rules for it to be more effective.

“I think that the rules that we put out are good ones,” Kagan said at a judicial conference in Sacramento. “I think that the thing that can be criticized is, you know, rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them. And this one, this set of rules does not.”

A view of the US Supreme Court on October 2, 2023 in Washington, DC.

Related article Supreme Court attempts to address ethics concerns with new code of conduct but leaves many questions unanswered

After the Supreme Court came under intense scrutiny in 2023 following a series of blockbuster investigative pieces that turned a spotlight on the alleged ethical lapses of several of the justices, the nine justices released an ethics code in November in an attempt to assuage concerns raised by Democratic lawmakers and others that its members had no formal code of conduct they were required to adhere to.

But notably absent from the code of conduct was an enforcement mechanism to hold justices accountable for any violations of the code, leading some court observers to regard it as a toothless Band-Aid for larger ethics issues that have dogged the court. The document leaves a wide range of decisions up to the discretion of individual justices, including decisions on recusal from sitting on cases.

The comments were made during a wide-ranging conversation before an audience of judges and lawyers at the 9th US Circuit Judicial Conference, in response to a question from one of the event’s moderators.

Kagan made the first public appearance of the