My name is Eric Tucker and I am *** reporter with the Associated Press in our Washington Bureau. My colleague Brian Sco and I embarked on *** project starting last November to determine what happens when Supreme Court justices travel to colleges and universities and law schools all across the country. We focused our attention on the Supreme Court because it's part of *** branch of government, namely the judiciary that receives far less public scrutiny than other branches of government. That's in part because the Supreme Court lacks an ethics code for its members. And so there's little oversight over what justices can and can't do another area that separates the court, not just the Supreme Court, but the judicial branch of government in general is the fact that there is no public records request that one could submit to the court to get information from them. And so in order to determine what we were able to determine about what actually happened during these visits to colleges and universities, we had to ask the colleges and universities themselves instead of the justices and instead of the court, the Supreme Court in many ways operates shielded from public scrutiny and public view, there are of course no cameras in the Supreme Court or in other federal courtrooms, meaning that the public is not able to see in real time through the lens of *** camera. What exactly is taking place? The absence of an ethics code is really important because part of what our reporting showed is that there are behaviors that go on among the justices and among their staff that went applied to other branches of government would not be considered permissible. Another thing that sets the Supreme Court and the Federal judiciary apart from other branches of government is the existence of lifetime appointments. Such that when *** member of the Supreme Court is confirmed to the bench, that is *** job that they are entitled to keep forever for the rest of their lives. There is no other government office that exists as *** lifetime appointment like that. The Supreme Court since its creation centuries ago, has existed as an independent autonomous entity even within the judicial branch of government. And that's in part *** reflection of the way the government was set up centuries ago with three separate but equal branches of government. And we have seen that the Supreme Court has been an entity that does not have any outside or independent oversight. The only oversight comes from within. We have seen how the court has adopted its own procedures sometimes in response to public scrutiny. But for the most part, there is no external, um, outside guide posts that governs the, the conduct, um, and keeps tabs on the behavior of the nine members of the Supreme Court.