Samuel Alito’s ethics record doesn’t fit a single narrative. He leads the entire Court in recusals — by a wide margin — because he holds individual stock in dozens of companies rather than the conflict-free funds most justices use. At the same time, he refused every call to recuse from the cases where the political stakes, not the financial ones, were highest. Both facts are true, both are documented, and both matter for understanding what an enforceable ethics code would actually need to address.

The Undisclosed Fishing Trip

ProPublica’s 2023 investigation revealed that in July 2008, Alito took a vacation at a luxury Alaska fishing lodge, flown there on a private jet owned by Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and major Republican donor. Chartering that jet independently could have cost more than $100,000 one way. Alito never disclosed the trip on his financial disclosure forms — a violation of the federal law requiring justices to report most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

In the years after that trip, Singer’s hedge fund had business before the Supreme Court at least ten times, including a 2014 case the Court agreed to resolve in a decade-long, multibillion-dollar dispute between Singer’s fund and Argentina. Alito did not recuse from any of these cases. ProPublica reported that ethics experts could not identify another instance of a justice ruling on cases involving a party that had given him an expensive, undisclosed gift.

When ProPublica prepared to publish, Alito did not respond to its questions directly. Instead, he published a pre-emptive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending himself before the story ran. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse later asked the Judicial Conference to examine whether Alito’s arrangement with the Journal — reportedly including input on which reporter would interview him — itself violated ethics rules against a judge commenting on matters that could come before the Court.

The Recusal Record Is Genuinely Two-Sided

This is where Alito’s record gets more complicated than a simple “never recuses” narrative — and being precise about it matters. Alito recused himself 23 times in the most recent term alone, more than any other justice by a wide margin, and has recused a combined 64 times across recent terms because of direct stock ownership in individual companies — he holds shares in roughly two dozen companies personally, rather than using the diversified funds most of his colleagues rely on precisely to avoid this problem. Most recently, Alito recused from a major Louisiana coastal-damage case, Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish, because of his holdings in ConocoPhillips, the parent company of a firm accused of extensive wetlands destruction — notably, only after he had already participated in the Court’s decision to hear the case in the first place, a timing sequence that drew its own criticism. His 2025 disclosure showed seven fossil-fuel industry equity holdings worth between $60,000 and $245,000 even as he faced separate pressure to recuse from a case brought by Exxon and Suncor Energy.

That high recusal rate reflects a genuine structural problem — a justice managing a large individual stock portfolio will hit conflicts constantly — but it is not evidence of an unusually cautious approach to recusal generally. When the conflict was political rather than financial, Alito’s answer was different.

Refusing to Recuse From January 6

In May 2024, reporting revealed that an upside-down American flag — a symbol adopted by the “Stop the Steal” movement — flew outside Alito’s Virginia home on January 17, 2021, days after the Capitol attack. Alito said he had “no involvement whatsoever” and blamed his wife for briefly raising it in response to a dispute with neighbors; a former neighbor publicly disputed that account. Separately, an “Appeal to Heaven” flag — a symbol associated with the Christian nationalist movement and carried by rioters during the Capitol attack — was photographed at Alito’s New Jersey beach house in 2023.

When the Court took up Trump’s immunity claim and the scope of obstruction charges against January 6 defendants, Democratic lawmakers and ethics watchdogs called on Alito to recuse, citing what they called an “indisputable appearance of a conflict of interest.” Alito refused, offering no detailed explanation beyond asserting recusal wasn’t warranted, and participated in both cases.

The Secret Recordings

In June 2024, filmmaker Lauren Windsor secretly recorded Alito at a Supreme Court Historical Society event while posing as a sympathetic conservative. In the recordings, Alito said that on fundamental cultural and political disputes, “one side or the other is going to win,” and when Windsor suggested the country needed to “return to a place of godliness,” Alito agreed.

Zero Formal Accountability

As with every sitting justice, no independent body has the authority to investigate or sanction Alito for any of the above. The Supreme Court’s November 2023 code of conduct — adopted directly in response to the Alito and Thomas reporting — carries no enforcement mechanism. Complaints about a justice’s conduct have nowhere to go except public pressure, which neither the fishing trip nor the flags nor the recusal refusals have translated into any consequence at all.

Why This Matters for Reform

Alito’s record makes a different, more precise case for reform than a simple corruption narrative would. His stock-driven recusal rate — the highest on the Court by a wide margin — is itself an argument for a rule several ethics reform proposals already include: requiring justices to divest individual stock holdings into blind trusts or diversified funds, the same standard many federal officials in other branches already meet. That single change would likely eliminate most of Alito’s 64 recent recusals without requiring a constitutional amendment or a change to the Court’s size.

The flags and the Singer trip are a different problem entirely, and point toward the case for a binding ethics code with independent investigative authority — because the current code has no mechanism to even formally examine whether flying insurrection-linked symbols while ruling on insurrection-related cases crosses a line, let alone penalize it. Term limits address neither problem directly, but they do lower the stakes of any single justice’s ethics failures by guaranteeing regular turnover regardless of how any one case is decided.

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