The American Judicature Society is one of the primary organizations in the United States working in the area of judicial ethics.  The Society offers a number of ethics resources including an online resource library, ethics publications by subscription, and one of the most highly developed, comprehensive websites on judicial ethics in the United States.

The American Society for Public Administration has adopted an ethics code for government employees in general.  It's not specifically court-related, but it may be useful to someone drafting a code for any public agency.  If the link doesn't work, you can also download the file in Word format at this link.

The American Bar Association's Joint Commission to Evaluate the Model Code of Judicial Conduct has assembled a state-by-state directory of codes and canons for judges and judicial officers.  Although the site is clearly not focused on general court staff, many judicial conduct codes refer or apply to court employees in some provisions so this site may still be useful to court managers (for example, Minnesota's code, Canon 3(B)(2) applies judicial standards of "fidelity and diligence" to court employees).     

Benjamin Cardozo Law School in New York assembled this list of of links to ethics codes and ethics opinions for all 50 States -- although the list is almost exclusively judge and attorney related, not for court staff.  

The California Center for Judicial Education & Research offers an excellent online ethics training course for court employees based on a program developed by the California Judicial Administration Institute of California.  Although the webpage is dated 2003, we only recently discovered this online program.  The course presents a hypothetical scenario and then a question based on the corresponding tenants of their code.  

The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago doesn't focus on courts or court employees, but they have collected over 850 ethics codes drawn from over 25 different professions and general areas of work.  This is the single biggest collection of ethics codes we've found so far.  It also includes a huge bibliography on ethics codes, resources on how to draft codes, etc.  If you're trying to do some work in comparative ethics codes, this website is the place.

Cornell Law School's American Legal Ethics Library does an excellent job cataloging the canons, codes, opinions, and ethics enforcement structures in all 50 states in the US and the District of Columbia.  However, the materials do concentrate on ethics for judges and attorneys and generally do not include codes for administrative or clerical court employees. 

The Ethics Resource Center is a non-profit organization in Washington, DC "devoted to organizational ethics."  They've assembled a large collection of ethics-related web links and other materials on their website, including a page on ethics references specifically for government employees.  It also includes links to the federal (US) ethics codes for both judges and court staff.   Their main web address is www.ethics.org. 

The Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics is affiliated with John Jay College of the City University of New York.  The center and their website collects information about criminal justice and related ethics topics, research links, conferences, and training programs in ethics.  The center mostly focuses on law enforcement and criminal justice (obviously), rather than court employees or court staff generally.  

Institute for Local Self Government, JoAnne Speer, 2003.  Developing A Local Agency Ethics Code: A Process Oriented Guide.  For those thinking of drafting or adopting an ethics code, this is a good resource on developing codes, their purposes, goals, and different approaches to ethics code development.  (I wish I had read this book a long time ago to clarify my thinking on ethics code development.)  The Institute publishing this resource is funded by the Waste Management, Inc. Charitable Foundation, but don't let that throw you off.

The Josephson Institute for Ethics is a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles.  The Josephson Institute is one of Peter Kiefer's favorite resources.  The site offers a lot of useful materials, references, event announcements, and this page listing dozens of other ethics-related websites.   

The National Center for State Courts, headquartered in Williamsburg, Virginia offers a very well developed collection of model codes, samples, training guides, and other materials on ethics, especially for non-judicial or administrative court employees.  

The New Ethic is a general ethics website written or collected by Joseph B. Juhasz at the University of Colorado and Lester A. Shepard.  It's very philosophical and rambling and -- well, you'll see.  However, the page we've linked here for The New Ethic  includes a huge list of online ethics references, institutes, study centers, advocacy organizations, ethics libraries, and about 50 ethics codes over a wide array of different professions.  (On our printer the list of links runs 12 single-spaced pages, just to give you an idea of the size of the collection.)    

The New Mexico Judicial Education Center has constructed an excellent, web-based tutorial for court employees on ethics and ethics codes.  Click on the "dilemma" links in the upper right corner of each ethics sub-topic to see the interactive hypothetical scenario questions. 

Professor  David Hricik at Mercer University School of Law in Macon, Georgia maintains www.hricik.com, an  interesting web site on ethics and risk management.  The site is mostly focused on ethics for attorneys and the practice of law rather than on court employees, but parts of the site may be useful to court managers.  Professor Hricik has also posted his  occasional ethics articles and lists a number of ethics-related "State Links" on the website.

The United State Office of Government Ethics is specifically and exclusively an executive branch agency, not court or legislative, but if you're researching public employee ethics in general, you might find this site helpful.  Many of the Common Ethics Issues listed on the site arise in the courts and legislative bodies as well as executive agencies.     

 The Development Gateway is an international assistance organization funded by the World Bank and other supporting countries.  This link offers a copy of the report on an ethics training and development project for court clerks in Romania in 2005, conducted by the American Bar Association/Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA/CEELI) and funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).   American court employees will immediately recognize most of the hypothetical scenarios.  This reference is especially good because it includes detailed descriptions of the scenarios, how the sessions were conducted, and a long appendix of comparative ethics codes, including from the US.  Compiled 2005, published 2006, 88 pages, pdf.

 The American Bar Association/Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative has developed a assessment tool to measure the progress of judicial reforms in 30 different areas.  This link goes to a web page about their "Judicial Reform Index" (JRI) and also includes reform indices or summaries of how a number of countries are doing using JRI's criteria.  We have all these codes, but are they working, are they making any difference?  CEELI's Judicial Reform Index is one way to measure progress in a clear, systematic way.