“The norms of confidentiality at the court, they’re not gentle or subtle,” said Allison Orr Larsen, a professor at William and Mary Law School who clerked for Justice David H. Souter. “They are strongly and repeatedly emphasized.”As blunt and terrifying as those warnings may be, they are informal. So are the rules that apply to the justices themselves, who have been resistant to being bound by written procedures on most matters concerning their work.“They don’t even have written ethics rules for the justices,” said Paul M. Smith, a law professor at Georgetown University who clerked for Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. The leak, he said, and the focus on the lack of those standar …
