Last Tuesday, an alliance of government watchdog groups delivered 100,000 signatures to the Supreme Court along with a letter from hundreds of law professors calling on the justices to voluntarily adopt the code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges and to reform how they handle requests for recusals.

A federal appeals court ruling the next day on the case of a federal trial judge illustrates why recusal over a conflict of interest cannot be left solely to the judge involved and needs to be reviewed by other jurists. Yet the Supreme Court operates with no such mechanism, which is critical to preserving confidence in the court’s integrity.

Judge Loren Smith, applying a federal statute, had awarded four oil companies $87.3 million from the federal government in October 2009 to reimburse them for their costs in cleaning up hazardous waste from World War II. A few weeks later, he told the parties he realized his wife owned 98 shares of stock in Chevron, the parent company of Texaco and Union Oil, two companies in the lawsuit.

The government filed a motion to require that Judge Smith recuse himself from the case under the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which applies to all federal judges except the Supreme Court justices. He acknowledged the conflict of interest about Texaco and Union Oil and asked that their claims be assigned to another judge. But he said he would retain control over the judgment for the other two companies in the case, Shell and Arco.