We are Eric Tucker and Brian Slodysko, reporters for The Associated Press. We submitted record requests to public colleges, universities and other institutions that have hosted Supreme Court justices over the past decade. The documents show the ethical dilemmas of their visits. Ask us anything!

That's an important question and I don't know that there's an obvious answer. BUT I do think we don't have to look far to the example set by lower courts to see that ethics codes do indeed exist within the federal judiciary and are followed.

It's hard to know exactly what behavior would or would not be incorporated into any ethics code, making it especially challenging to know how one could be enforced. For instance, when it came to justices attending events with donors, it became clear in our reporting that the court did not see such conduct as in violation of any sort of prohibition against fundraising — but that's due in part to the very narrow definition the court employs when it comes to fundraising.

Still, the code of ethics followed by lower court judges on the federal bench is fairly easy to follow and clear in intent and purpose; theoretically, a code of ethics at the Supreme Court level could be modeled after that. And last week, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said he believes that justices should follow the same code of conduct laid out by officials in other branches of government.

-ET

This is a mixed bag. Some schools clearly took our requests seriously and did their best, in good faith, to provide the records we sought. Others not so much.

The records custodian at the University of Georgia called me to grouse about a records requests related to two visits by Justice Thomas to the school. He said he felt that we were trying to persecute a conservative justice and initially quoted us fees of about $18,000 to provide records. We narrowed our search and brought the cost down but are still waiting on documents.

The University of Alaska provided about a dozen pages of records that showed nothing then simply stopped responding to my phone calls and emails.

Rutgers in New Jersey was extremely unhelpful. They acknowledged having thousands of pages of records but insisted on such narrow search terms that they yielded little.

-BS

Hi, that is a great question, and yes, we did indeed focus our requests on all justices who have been on the Supreme Court, past and present, over the last decade. We also accumulated much more reporting than we were able to fit in our story, including on some of those retired justices you mention. One thing we were able to determine is that travel by justices is not a new phenomenon and several members no longer on the court also visited schools, including Justice Ginsburg, fairly regularly. I would however say that, as we assessed how far to push each school in terms of compliance with request, we did take into account whether they were still current members of the court, and with some limited exceptions, we probably did make an unspoken decision to focus more reporting energy on pursuing with full vigor information about the current members of the court.

-ET

Yes. The court could impose a binding code of conduct and create an independent oversight authority empowered to enforce it.

Further, Congress could pass a law that does the same thing. For example, as a result of reforms enacted by Congress in the wake of Watergate, the justices of the Supreme Court were required to publicly report their personal financial holdings for the first time.

-BS

There's no right way to pursue a career in journalism, but one recommendation I would have is to try to find areas you're interested in and then specialize in those subjects.

My reporting colleague on this project, Brian Slodysko, is an expert in campaign finance — that's a niche area of journalism that most reporters don't know much about, but it's an example of a subject that, if you're good at it, you can make yourself more marketable for a position.

I used to believe that it was better to try to be a "jack of all trades" in pursuing a journalism career, but I increasingly believe that a better approach is to try to master a particular area of the profession — computer coding or cybersecurity, for instance — and cultivate a specialty and expertise in that area. That would be my recommendation, but there's definitely no one single answer!

-ET

We have not heard from any of the donors mentioned in the story since publishing. Though one of them, whom I visited with in Waco, told me back in May that he would come find me if he didn’t like the story. He was quite the colorful character.

As for the Supreme Court members benefiting from their relationships with schools and their donors ... I think some of the other stories out there by ProPublica show the justices have benefited in the form of vacations. Our story took a different tack and was focused on what happens when the justices travel to schools for speaking engagements.

I think it’s fair to say the justices received nice visits, with high-end accommodation, that was made possible in many instances by the schools’ ability to raise money from their donors. In some cases, it was closely tied to the event itself. Two businessmen in Waco spent over $20,000 to host events tied to Justice Thomas’ 2017 appearance. The University of Hawaii law school — which explicitly marketed their “jurist-in-residence” to court justices as a trip to paradise with considerable “downtime” — said the program was made possible by contributions from donors.

-BS

I think it's hard to assess the scrutiny that will be given to rulings of the past two decades — or at least what sort of revelations such scrutiny will reveal. I would say that we did not find, nor do I think have other journalists, any evidence of a justice's opinion or ruling being influenced in some ways by outside activities. There are legitimate questions that can and should be raised, as I believe we did in our piece on Justice Sotomayor, about the standards for recusal when a justice has a business relationship with a party like a book publisher, and I think that's a ripe for additional reporting. No institution revels in harsh scrutiny and I don't think the Supreme Court is an exception.

One thing journalists can do, though, is to be honest and upfront when they approach the court (or other institutions) about their findings and about what they expect their stories to say. In our case, we sent the Supreme Court a very long and detailed email a week before publication that laid out our findings and made clear to the court exactly what our story would say. That meant that when we published, there were no surprises in our story, and we afforded them a vehicle in our story to respond to and challenge our findings.

-ET

The entire court system is 'mostly' corrupt. Take your local prosecutor out to golf and ask them anything about it ☺️

We received lots of responses from state universities in which they redacted certain information; asked that we pay large fees for the processing of our requests; or requested that we narrow our original requests to make them easier to fulfill.

Fortunately, I'm not sure that there were ever privilege arguments that were invoked, even in instances when states redacted significant details. I would say the closest we came to that was at a university in Texas, which disclosed the existence of a dinner with donors for Justice Thomas but did not share with us the identity of the invitees, citing an advisory opinion from the state attorney general that said institutions of higher education can withhold identities of donors.

-ET

From our perspective, more robust state FOIA laws would be an improvement. During the course of reporting this project, it became clear which states had laws that skewed toward greater disclosure and which states allowed the schools to skirt by without handing over much.

I would also say that a lot depended on the records custodians whose job was to pull together and provide the records. Some of them clearly believed in the value of providing records to the public. Others less so.

-BS

I have to push back a little on the premise of your question. Our reporting shows that Justice Sotomayor used her court staff to further a personal commercial endeavor. That is conduct that would be prohibited for any member of Congress, the executive branch and just about any other government office holder I can think of. That’s not trivial. If it were a different justice — say a conservative for example — who had done the same thing, we would have written the same story.

-BS

Paying Supreme Court justices more is often presented as a potential solution to this dilemma. I think the success of this approach would depend on how much they are paid. Another factor that could is whether a binding code of conduct is imposed.

If the justices were both paid more and subject to stricter ethical and reporting requirements, I think it would offer a powerful incentive to curb the kind of behavior that has been the subject of news headlines in recent months.

-BS

Seriously? More money never, ever, solves corruption.

People always want more money. What could we possibly pay them to compete with billionaire "gifts"?