A week after Chief Justice John G. Roberts defended Supreme Court justices’ process for deciding whether or not to recuse themselves from cases that pose a potential ethical conflict, Justice Stephen Breyer also weighed in on the debate in defense of the Court’s practice.

“There’s a code of ethics. It’s 24 volumes. It’s in my office. It’s up in the library. Before I have any case that involves ethics I go read it and see what’s there,” Breyer said Saturday at a Washington legal conference, according to the Associated Press.

As the challenge to the federal health care law is set to be heard by  the Court in March, some critics have called on Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan to recuse themselves from considering the case, and urged ethics rules to be revised binding the Supreme Court to the same recusal standards that other federal judges must follow.

Roberts, in his annual report on the judiciary, argued that the Court’s justices do consult the Judicial Code as well as other standards in deciding whether or not to recuse.

Breyer echoed Roberts’ sentiments.

“We are bound. We’re acting as if we’re bound,” Breyer said.

Also like Roberts, Breyer noted a key difference between Supreme Court justices and other federal judges: when lower court judges recuse, they are replaced. When a Supreme Court justice sits out a case, there is no replacement, and the decision can make a difference in the outcome of a case.

“That means I have to take with absolute seriousness the obligation to sit as well as the obligation not to sit,” Breyer said.

“Look, anything can be transformed into a process,” Justice Stephen Breyer told Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Wednesday during oral arguments in the patent case Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, “Look at those real estate ones, lawyers ones. I have a way of making a great argument in the Supreme Court. You know, you could patent some of your arguments.”

This was one of four funny comments from Breyer during this week of oral arguments, making him this week’s top laugh earner. Justice Antonin Scalia got three chuckles, while Justice Anthony Kennedy earned two laughs.

Here are the standings after six weeks:

Justice Antonin Scalia: 21

Justice Stephen Breyer: 16

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: 9

Justice Anthony Kennedy: 3

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1

Justice Elena Kagan: 1

Justice Clarence Thomas: 0

Justice Samuel Alito: 0

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: 0

During oral arguments Tuesday in the case National Meat Association v. Harris, the Justice Stephen Breyer asked if the Court had to “write an 11-part opinion” dissecting each individual provision of a state statute to determine if it was preempted by a federal meat inspection law.

“I’m not trying to get out of work,” Breyer said, drawing laughter from the audience. “I just want to know.”

Without missing a beat, Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in.

“I’d like to get out of the work, to tell you the truth,” Scalia said as the crowd laughed again.

This week, Scalia broke open a wide lead in this terms funniest justice contest, earning a whopping eight laughs during oral arguments. Breyer earned three, while Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg each made the crowd chuckle once.

Here are the standings so far:

Justice Antonin Scalia: 15

Justice Stephen Breyer: 10

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: 7

Justice Elena Kagan: 1

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1

Justice Anthony Kennedy: 0

Justice Clarence Thomas (silence continues): 0

Justice Samuel Alito: 0

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: 0

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has twice battled cancer and has since been the subject of speculative whispers regarding whether and when she would step down from the Supreme Court bench, told USA Today that she feels fine and isn’t going anywhere.

Ginsburg said she received a clean bill of health after her most recent annual checkup. Ginsburg, 78, has shot down retirement rumors before, saying that she’d like to stay on the bench until she is at least 82 – the age at which Justice Louis Brandeis retired from the Court in 1939.

But as the next presidential election looms just one year away, speculation over Ginsburg’s future on the Court and the implication of a possible vacancy next term have some left leaning political commentators  openly urging Ginsburg to step down now. In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy wrote that Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer should consider hanging up their robes so that President Barack Obama gets two more Supreme Court appointments before his first term ends.

“If Obama loses, they will have contributed to a disaster,” Kennedy wrote in a piece on The New Republic’s website.

After oral arguments concluded at the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer had another appearance to make – before Congress.

The justices traveled across the street from the Supreme Court building to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, where Scalia lamented the declining in quality of federal judges. That decline, he said, was caused by Congress’ overzealous criminal lawmaking, which created the need for so many more judges.

“Federal judges ain’t what they used to be,” Scalia told the committee, according to Mark Sherman of the Associated Press. The federal judiciary is “not as elite as it used to be.”

The justices, never afraid to publicly disagree, expressed their different views of constitutional interpretation.

“I’m hoping that the ‘living Constitution’ will die,” Scalia said at one point, according to the Huffington Post’s Mick Sacks. Breyer responded by repeating a nearly 200-year-old quote by Chief Justice John Marshall: “It is a constitution we are expounding” because it is “to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.”"

She may not pull in a lot of laughs during oral arguments, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is laughing all the way to the bank as the Court’s wealthiest Supreme Court justice by a long shot, according to a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

With a net worth somewhere between $10.7 million and a whopping $45.5 million, Ginsburg easily tops the list of wealthiest justices, according to the center, which crunched the justices’ financial disclosure data from 2009 (the report based on the latest 2010 filings will be unveiled in the fall). Ginsburg’s holdings include a $6 million retirement nest egg.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s second-place finish is attributable mainly to an array of investments (some of which spur him to recuse himself in cases involving the companies he invests in). His wealth is estimated to be between $4.6 million and $16.2 million.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan are also millionaires, according to the analysis, though none come close to Ginsburg or even Breyer.

And while Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas can each claim a net worth well in the six-digit range, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cannot. In fact, she could be the only justice in the red. Her net worth is somewhere between $95,000 in debt to $50,000, according to the report.

Here’s something Justice Antonin Scalia can’t even disagree with: today his colleague and frequent verbal sparring partner, Justice Stephen Breyer, turns 73. Happy birthday, Justice!

In life, there are a few certainties. Among them, death and taxes, the Earth orbiting the sun, and Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer disagreeing about something.

On the bench, Scalia and Breyer are the Supreme Court’s very own “Odd Couple,” wasting few opportunities to verbally spar on the bench and give new meaning to the term “oral argument.”

Read more about the justices sparring – and listen to audio clips – in Lawyers USA’s special audio feature “At the High Court, it’s still Scalia v. Breyer” (Sub. Req’d)

The U.S. Supreme Court has the power to lay down the law of the land. But such rulings are only as powerful as their enforcement, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out during a speaking engagement last week. And for much of the nation’s history, he said, it wasn’t always clear that Court’s rulings would be carried out.

Speaking at the Calvin Coolidge Center in Plymouth, Vt., last week, Breyer gave the example of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision – which required President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send troops to Arkansas to enforce.

“You can say, ‘well, did it matter what Eisenhower did?’“ Breyer said, Vermont Public Radio reports.  “For me, I’m a judge.  I’m prejudiced.  I’m biased.  I think what he did was fabulous.  That it made a difference to the rule of law in America and it is exactly one of the things that has helped turn around and answer the question, ‘Will they do it?’  The question that has bothered the court through much of its history.”

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will give an address at Harvard Law School today – entirely in French. C’est vrai!

Harvard Law’s dean of students sent this email out to the schools community, according to Above the Law:

Hi –

Sorry to break into your summer but Justice Stephen Breyer will be on campus this Friday, July 22. He will be giving a presentation in French and is inviting any French-speaking HLS students to join him.

The conference will take place from 11:30am to 1:00pm. Please contact me as soon as possible if you will be here and would like to participate. The event is closed so all names must be given to the US Marshals in advance. Thanks!

The justice will be speaking with members of Tunisian civil society and legal community about the U.S. Constitution and its role in our democratic system, according to the Facebook page Co.Nx, which will also carry the event live at 11:30 EDT, for those French-speaking SCOTUS junkies who can’t make it to Cambridge, Mass.