In an article on Wednesday, Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s Supreme Court correspondent, described being ogled by Judge Kozinski years ago, as a clerk for a fellow judge. One evening, she called Judge Kozinski’s chambers in search of another clerk. The judge answered the phone and asked her where she was. When she told him she was in a hotel room, she said, he responded, “What are you wearing?”

These infuriating accounts come as no surprise to the many women who had heard of, or personally experienced, Judge Kozinski’s penchant for sexual comments to his female clerks and other court employees. In what has become a painfully familiar phrase over the last two months, the judge’s conduct was an “open secret” in the federal court system, law schools, and the legal profession at large. In 2009, when he was chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, he was reprimanded for keeping pornography on a server accessible to the public. An opinion by the Judicial Council of the Third Circuit said Judge Kozinski exhibited “poor judgment” that “resulted in embarrassment to the institution of the federal judiciary” — the equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

The new allegations, which Judge Kozinski has not clearly denied, show far more than poor judgment. They point instead to repeated disrespect and harassment of women, the exploitation of the unique intimacy of the clerkship environment, and the abuse of the immense power a federal judge holds over the young lawyers who depend on him for professional advancement. Ms. Bond wrote that after one encounter with the judge, “I felt like a prey animal.” The stress of working under those conditions, she said, nearly led her to quit. It damaged her mental health and derailed a promising legal career, which she eventually gave up to write romance novels.

Yet no one spoke out publicly, until now, because the relationship between a judge and his or her clerks is “built on worshipful silence,” as Ms. Lithwick put it. This makes sense as a general rule of confidentiality protecting judicial deliberations. As a cloak of secrecy hiding degrading behavior, it looks more like a code of omertà. Judge Kozinski was insistent that his clerks never reveal what went on behind closed doors — a tendency that went hand-in-hand with his well-known desire to dominate all aspects of his clerks’ lives. “I control what you read, what you write, when you eat. You don’t sleep if I say so,” he said, according to Ms. Bond. “Do you understand?”

What is the right way to deal with unacceptable conduct over many years by a life-tenured judge? The Constitution says federal judges “shall hold their offices during good behavior.” By any reasonable measure, Judge Kozinski’s behavior has not been good for a long time, yet he has been able to skate by. No longer, as the nation engages in a long-overdue moment of reckoning with the sheer breadth of sexual harassment and predation by powerful men, and its impact on the lives of working women. Some of these men have committed graver offenses than Judge Kozinski stands accused of. But sexual misconduct by a federal judge is particularly troublesome, both because the American public pays the judge’s salary, and because trust in the judiciary depends on judges being seen as not simply independent, but above reproach. And then there are the very reasonable concerns about Judge Kozinski’s ability to hear a sexual-harassment or discrimination case; how could any plaintiff be confident the judge would give her a fair hearing?

The judiciary has its own internal disciplinary process, which includes fact-finding and other due-process protections, and which can lead to sanctions as minor as a reprimand or as serious as a referral to Congress for possible impeachment proceedings. Federal judges are almost never impeached — it’s happened only 15 times in the nation’s history, less often than the Constitution has been amended. The last time was in 2010, when G. Thomas Porteous, a Louisiana district court judge, was impeached and removed for accepting bribes and lying under oath.

There’s a good reason for keeping impeachment of judges very rare: The federal judiciary must remain as free as possible from intrusion by the political branches. But that is not a defense if the judiciary itself can’t meaningfully address unacceptable behavior in its ranks. Judge Kozinski’s case provides an opportunity to show that it can.