The Supreme Court announced this week that it will begin using conflict-of-interest detection software to identify when justices should recuse themselves from cases. Parties filing before the Court will now be required to list stock ticker symbols in their filings to help the software flag potential conflicts.

It sounds like progress. It isn’t—or at least, it isn’t nearly enough.

The announcement is the latest example of the Court responding to legitimate ethics crises with the minimum possible action: a technical workaround that avoids confronting the actual problem. The actual problem is that two Supreme Court justices are still holding individual company stocks while deciding cases that affect American corporations, their shareholders, and the broader economy.

What the Court Actually Announced

Starting in mid-March, a software system developed internally by Court staff will scan case filings and compare parties and attorneys against a list maintained by each justice’s chambers. To enable this scanning, litigants must now include stock ticker symbols when disclosing corporate interests.

The idea is to catch conflicts automatically—so a justice doesn’t accidentally participate in a case involving a company whose stock they hold.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, something lower federal courts have been doing for twenty years. The software that district courts and circuit courts use to screen for conflicts has existed since 2007. The Supreme Court—the highest court in the land, the institution that decides what the law means for 330 million Americans—is just now getting around to implementing basic conflict-checking technology.

And it took them over two years to do even this. The Court promised to implement such a system when it adopted its voluntary ethics code in November 2023. That code came after bombshell reporting revealed Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted more than $4 million in undisclosed gifts and luxury travel from conservative billionaire Harlan Crow. The software announcement arrived 827 days after that ethics code was adopted.

The Fix That Doesn’t Fix the Problem

Here is what the software does: it detects when a justice owns stock in a company involved in a case after the case arrives at the Court.

Here is what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t prevent justices from owning those stocks in the first place.

Seven of the nine justices apparently understand this. According to financial disclosures, seven justices hold no individual company stocks at all—they invest in diversified mutual funds, index funds, or bonds, which effectively eliminates this category of conflict. Their holdings don’t create recusal obligations because they’re not betting on any particular company’s success.

Two justices have not made that choice.

Justice Samuel Alito holds stock in more than two dozen individual companies. His individual stock portfolio has generated recusal obligations that account for roughly one-third of all recusals at the Supreme Court. Last month, Alito recused himself from an environmental case involving ConocoPhillips—a company he owned stock in—just four days before oral arguments. He had initially refused to step aside after the company withdrew its petition from the Supreme Court, but recused himself when it became clear the company remained a party in the lower-court proceedings. For a case that had already been fully briefed and scheduled, this last-minute recusal created significant disruption.

Chief Justice John Roberts holds shares in two companies—but those two holdings tell a revealing story about why software alone can’t solve this problem.

Roberts’ Holdings and Their Consequences

Roberts’ 2024 financial disclosure shows he owns between $500,000 and $1 million in Thermo Fisher Scientific (ticker: TMO), a life sciences and medical technology conglomerate, and between $100,000 and $250,000 in Lam Research Corporation (ticker: LRCX), a semiconductor equipment manufacturer.

These are not obscure small-cap stocks. They are major S&P 500 companies with substantial business interests in areas that regularly generate litigation—patent law, corporate tax policy, regulatory matters, antitrust. And Roberts’ history demonstrates exactly how these holdings create problems.

The Life Technologies Failure

In December 2016, Roberts participated in oral arguments in Life Technologies Corp. v. Promega Corp., a patent dispute over genetic testing technology. The problem: Life Technologies is a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific, the company in which Roberts holds stock worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Roberts owned 1,212 shares at the time.

Roberts didn’t recuse himself before oral arguments. He didn’t recuse himself during oral arguments. He participated fully in the case—asking questions, engaging with attorneys, potentially influencing the direction of the Court’s deliberations. Only afterward did someone catch the conflict. Roberts then withdrew from the case.

The Supreme Court Clerk’s office acknowledged that “the ordinary conflict check conducted in the chief justice’s chambers inadvertently failed to find this potential conflict”—even though the company’s corporate disclosure statement in the case filing explicitly identified Life Technologies as “an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific.”

In other words: the information was right there in the filing. The conflict check still failed.

Fix the Court noted this was “the third time in the last 15 months in which a justice missed a stock conflict and failed—at least initially—to recuse himself from a case as required by law.”

Moore v. United States: A Different Kind of Conflict

Roberts’ Lam Research holding created a different—and arguably more troubling—type of conflict in Moore v. United States, the major corporate tax case the Court decided in 2023.

The case involved a challenge to the 2017 mandatory repatriation tax on deferred corporate foreign earnings. A broad ruling striking down the tax could have affected trillions of dollars in corporate offshore holdings. Analysts calculated that Lam Research stood to receive as much as $868 million in tax relief under a broad ruling. Roberts’ Thermo Fisher stake was similarly situated: a broad ruling could have delivered $1.4 billion in relief to that company.

Roberts participated in the case. He did not recuse.

Unlike the Life Technologies situation, this wasn’t a technical oversight—Lam Research and Thermo Fisher weren’t parties to the case. Under current judicial ethics rules, recusal is required when a justice owns stock in a party, not merely in a company that would benefit from a ruling. But the financial interest is real: a Supreme Court decision could directly enrich Roberts through his holdings, yet he faces no legal obligation to step aside.

This is the gap the software won’t fill. The new ticker-symbol system will catch conflicts where Roberts owns stock in a named party. It won’t catch cases where Roberts’ holdings give him a direct financial stake in the outcome without the company appearing on the docket.

The new software will help catch cases like the ConocoPhillips situation before they reach the oral argument stage. That’s better than catching them after. But it doesn’t address why Alito owns stock in dozens of companies with potential business before the Court, or why Roberts holds individual company shares, while the other seven justices have figured out how to structure their finances without creating these problems.

What Actual Reform Would Look Like

The organization Fix the Court, which has advocated for Supreme Court transparency for years, put it plainly: the Court should “agree as a Court not to hold any stocks during their tenures.”

This is not a radical idea. It’s the standard that seven justices already meet voluntarily. It would mean switching holdings to mutual funds, index funds, or bonds—investments that are widely available, perfectly capable of generating returns, and that don’t create entanglements with specific companies that might have business before the Court.

Federal executive branch employees in sensitive positions are routinely required to divest specific holdings that create conflicts. The Office of Government Ethics has entire frameworks for managing exactly this kind of situation. Financial regulators, cabinet secretaries, and senior executive branch officials are expected to restructure their investments to avoid conflicts. The argument that Supreme Court justices—who have lifetime appointments and are deciding cases affecting the entire economy—shouldn’t be held to at least this standard is difficult to take seriously.

Instead, the Court has chosen software. Software that requires every litigant to now provide ticker symbols in their filings. Software that creates additional administrative burdens for parties before the Court. Software that will work until it doesn’t—until a company operates under a different name, until a holding isn’t yet captured in the system, until the list in a justice’s chambers isn’t fully updated.

The Pattern of Minimum Viable Ethics

This announcement fits a pattern that has defined the Court’s approach to ethics since the Thomas revelations began:

  • Gifts scandal: Justices accepted millions in undisclosed luxury travel and gifts. The Court’s response was a voluntary code of conduct with no enforcement mechanism.
  • Secrecy: Internal deliberations were leaked, and journalists began reporting on how the Court operates. The Court’s response was NDAs for employees—not for justices.
  • Stock conflicts: A justice’s stock holdings have generated a disproportionate share of all Court recusals and nearly disrupted oral arguments in a major environmental case. The Court’s response is software that detects the problem after the stocks are already held.

In each case, the Court takes the step that allows it to claim it has addressed the concern without actually requiring justices to change their behavior in any meaningful way.

The Real Stakes

When a justice recuses from a case, it doesn’t simply mean one justice sits out. The Court operates with nine justices and decides cases by majority. A recusal creates the possibility of a 4-4 tie—which means the lower court’s decision stands, with no binding precedent set for the rest of the country.

Alito’s stock-driven recusals don’t just create an appearance of impropriety. They create a structural distortion in how the Court functions. Cases that might otherwise result in binding national precedent instead produce split decisions, leaving different rules in different circuits. Cases that were fully briefed and argued by parties who spent enormous resources preparing suddenly have a different panel deciding them than anyone anticipated.

And that’s when the recusal actually happens. The ConocoPhillips case was unusual because someone caught the conflict in time. Given that Alito holds stock in more than two dozen companies, how many cases has he participated in where a conflict wasn’t caught, wasn’t recognized, or wasn’t flagged because no one connected the dots?

The software is supposed to help with that. But the only real solution is not to hold the stocks.

Fixing the Minimum Bar

The Supreme Court is supposed to be the institution that sets the standard for law and justice in the United States. It has lifetime-tenured justices who face no elections, no meaningful external oversight, and now—following a series of self-imposed NDAs—virtually no transparency about their internal deliberations.

In exchange for that extraordinary insulation from accountability, the absolute minimum we should be able to expect is that justices structure their finances to avoid conflicts with parties who appear before them. That’s a standard that seven of nine justices apparently accept. It’s a standard that lower court judges and executive branch officials are required to meet.

The Court announcing software that catches conflicts after they arise—technology that other courts implemented when George W. Bush was in his second term—is not an ethics reform. It’s an administrative adjustment that allows the Court to claim credit for addressing a problem it has chosen not to actually fix.

Gabe Roth of Fix the Court said it best: the new system is “a positive step but not a major improvement.” He’s being diplomatic. The improvement is roughly equivalent to a restaurant with a recurring food safety violation installing a better smoke detector rather than fixing the kitchen.

The detector is fine. But the fire is still burning.

The Supreme Court’s new conflict-checking software takes effect in mid-March. Parties filing before the Court will be required to list stock ticker symbols in corporate disclosures. Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts are the only justices who currently hold individual company stocks, according to financial disclosure reports.

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