The Boney Courthouse in downtown Anchorage, across the street from the larger Nesbett Courthouse, holds the Alaska Supreme Court chambers. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
The Alaska Court System is preparing to finalize new ethics guidelines that will determine whether state judges must opt out from hearing cases due to personal conflicts.
An extensive new ethics code, modeled on a national standard drafted by the American Bar Association, is open for public comment through Jan. 23.
The changes, which stretch for dozens of dense, jargon-filled pages, prescribe things like what a judge can ethically do during an election, how to respond if someone’s life might be endangered by secrecy and even what happens if an attorney is drunk in the courtroom.
“The primary purpose in my mind … is so a judge can look at it to determine whether what the judge is thinking about doing or is being asked to do is ethical,” said former Alaska Chief Justice Daniel Winfree, a key member of the committee that has been working on the redraft since 2018.
That predates recent concerns over the ethical standards used by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose members have been accused of accepting excessive gifts from people with issues in front of the court.
Alaska’s existing code of ethics dates to 1998 and was based on a model released in 1990 by the American Bar Association.
The association released a new model code in 2007, but Alaska didn’t adopt it. In 2018, as the court system dealt with a rising number of Alaskans representing themselves in court, judges were struggling with what they could and couldn’t do to help, Winfree said.
He suggested adopting part of the new model code to help with the issue.
“And all of a sudden, it got morphed into, ‘Well, we haven’t looked at the entire (code) since the whole thing changed. And so, would you like to chair a committee?’”
Winfree’s been working on the new code since then, continuing even after his retirement from the Alaska Supreme Court in 2023.
“It took a lot longer than I would have expected,” he said.
The code was supposed to become effective in April, but Winfree and others in the court system wanted a longer public comment period. It’s now scheduled for October 2026, time enough to make changes and fix any issues raised through public comments, according to Winfree.
The code applies to members of the Alaska Supreme Court, district court judges, superior court judges, and magistrates. All but magistrates are also covered by the Alaska Commission on Judicial Conduct.
Federal U.S. District Court Judge Joshua Kindred resigned from Alaska’s federal courts in 2024 after an investigation found significant misconduct. He was later disbarred by the Alaska Supreme Court.
Kindred was a federal judge, not a state one, but the new draft gives a nod to his misconduct.
As Winfree explained, the new code “makes clear that judges are supervisors and that they have other obligations as supervisors than just an obligation to not be a bad person.”
Winfree said that as public comments arrive, the drafting committee will examine each one to consider whether changes need to be made to the existing draft code.
“Depending on how many comments there are, we’ll probably have a couple of meetings with the Supreme Court to go over each of these things, make final changes, and then go to print,” he said.
“It’s a huge project. We’ll be so happy when it’s done, I bet.”
Correction: The revised code would apply to magistrate judges. A prior version of this article was incorrect.
