554
Opinion of the Court
Petitioners suggest that applying the "extrajudicial source" limitation to § 455(a) will cause disqualification of a trial judge to be more easily obtainable upon remand of a case by an appellate court than upon direct motion. We do not see why that necessarily follows; and if it does, why it is necessarily bad. Federal appellate courts' ability to assign a case to a different judge on remand rests not on the recusal statutes alone, but on the appellate courts' statutory power to "require such further proceedings to be had as may be just under the circumstances," 28 U. S. C. § 2106. That may permit a different standard, and there may be pragmatic reasons for a different standard. We do not say so—but merely say that the standards applied on remand are irrelevant to the question before us here.
For all these reasons, we think that the "extrajudicial source" doctrine, as we have described it, applies to § 455(a). As we have described it, however, there is not much doctrine to the doctrine. The fact that an opinion held by a judge derives from a source outside judicial proceedings is not a necessary condition for "bias or prejudice" recusal, since predispositions developed during the course of a trial will sometimes (albeit rarely) suffice. Nor is it a sufficient condition for "bias or prejudice" recusal, since some opinions acquired outside the context of judicial proceedings (for example, the judge's view of the law acquired in scholarly reading) will not suffice. Since neither the presence of an extrajudicial source necessarily establishes bias, nor the absence of an extrajudicial source necessarily precludes bias, it would be
(b)(1): The judge does not have to be subjectively biased or prejudiced, so long as he appears to be so. But nothing in subsection (a) eliminates the longstanding limitation of (b)(1), that "personal bias or prejudice" does not consist of a disposition that fails to satisfy the "extrajudicial source" doctrine. The objective appearance of an adverse disposition attributable to information acquired in a prior trial is not an objective appearance of personal bias or prejudice, and hence not an objective appearance of improper partiality.
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