What's your New Year's resolution? Maybe you've made a lot of them and hope you'll have the resolve to stick with at least one. That's always been my game plan.  

Actually, I'm not here to discuss or put pressure on yours, mine or ours. No, I'm focused on what the Supreme Court is resolving to do -- and hoping it's more than how many boondoggles some of its men and women in black can score or how many interest-free-loans-turned-gifts they can finagle and not report. In other words, is it finally going to get its shabby courthouse in order? And is it going to restore the feeling of confidence we should have that if we have a strong case, based on a long-standing precedent we've relied on, we'll have a reasonable expectation of prevailing?

You see, although the justices come and go over the years, and the pendulum of their decisions migrates back and forth within a acceptable arc, we don't expect to be lied to at their confirmation hearings about their respect for established precedents and then to be told those precedents were "egregious" from the outset and must be entirely overruled. Because when they do that -- and more than once -- we lose all respect for them and the integrity of their court. And then when we couple that with their failure to report all those plush boondoggles and cash gifts, and when they don't even recuse themselves from cases involving the sources of all that booty, we come to think they're probably fudging their tax returns and lying on loan applications, too.  

So, if we go back to those resolutions I mentioned, they've got a heck of a lot more to do than lose 10 pounds or spend less time on Meta. And those justices will need to maintain that resolve for many years to come. Because, you see, although bad acts may actually be fundraising opportunities in today's political cage fight, bad judicial reputations take lots of rehabilitation to repair, particularly when the bar has been set pretty high by predecessors some of us still recall.

Sure, the justices did grudgingly adopt a new code of ethics, though there's no enforcement mechanism and none of them are going to get fired if they maintain their recent behavioral precedents.

But let's not give up all hope. I mean, Chief Justice John Roberts compared himself to that umpire, also dressed in black, who works hard to get the balls and strikes right. And while the replays show that he screws up pretty badly from time to time, we still feel like the guy's doing the best he can and most of us aren't worried that someone is slipping him a little extra to make those egregious calls.   

Time will, as it often does, and we've got another season starting in April and another new year coming before you can say Roe v. Wade.

L. Phillips Runyon III has been practicing law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 of them.