Ketanji Brown Jackson has no documented history of undisclosed gifts or luxury travel from politically interested donors. Her ethics record centers on a large book advance, a conservative ethics complaint over disclosure completeness, and a recusal pledge from her confirmation hearing that played out in an unusually specific way once the underlying cases reached the Court. ...
Elena Kagan has no documented history of undisclosed gifts, luxury travel, or financial disclosure violations. Her ethics record instead centers on two recusal fights, more than a decade apart, both alleging that her prior work — as a government lawyer, and later as an occasional academic writer — created conflicts she should have avoided. She has also been an unusually public advocate for the kind of transparency several other justices have resisted. ...
Sonia Sotomayor’s ethics record is smaller in scale than several colleagues covered in this series, and it involves no undisclosed gifts or luxury travel. It centers on two connected issues: her staff’s role in promoting her personal book sales, and a documented process failure that led her to participate in cases involving her own publisher when she should have stepped aside. ...
Amy Coney Barrett’s record doesn’t fit the pattern of the justices covered so far on this site. She has recused herself multiple times for clearly identifiable personal and professional conflicts, including once alongside four other justices, both liberal and conservative, over the same publishing conflict. Her more significant ethics question is about timing and optics rather than concealment — and about her own defense of a Supreme Court practice that keeps recusal reasoning almost entirely private. ...
Brett Kavanaugh’s ethics record centers on a question that was never fully answered during his 2018 confirmation and a recusal debate that predates his time on the Court entirely — rooted in legal arguments he made as a private lawyer, years before he’d rule on cases testing exactly those arguments. ...
Neil Gorsuch’s ethics record centers on two episodes nine years apart: an undisclosed real estate buyer discovered shortly after he joined the Court, and a recusal that came only after a conflict became impossible to ignore rather than before. Both point to the same underlying pattern — disclosure and recusal decisions the public only learns about after journalists dig them up, not before. ...
As Chief Justice, John Roberts occupies a different position than his colleagues: he doesn’t just have his own ethics questions to answer, he personally oversaw the design of the ethics code meant to answer everyone else’s. Understanding his record means separating well-documented facts from a serious but still-unresolved allegation making its way through an unofficial process — and being precise about which is which matters more here than on almost any other justice’s page. ...
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. ...
Appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1991 and confirmed 52-48 after the Anita Hill hearings — the closest Supreme Court confirmation vote in over a century at the time — Clarence Thomas is now the longest-serving justice on the current Court. He is also the center of the most extensively documented ethics scandal in the Supreme Court’s modern history — one that produced a Senate investigation, a wave of financial-disclosure amendments, and no consequences at all. This page consolidates his ethics and recusal record in one place, with sources, and explains why his case is the one reform advocates point to most often when arguing for a binding ethics code. ...
Most justice biographies — including the Court’s own and most reference sites — cover career history and case output without addressing ethics or recusal conduct at all. These profiles do the opposite: each one consolidates a justice’s documented ethics and recusal record, sourced, in one place, and explains what it means for the case for reform. All nine sitting justices are covered below, and each page will be updated as new reporting emerges. ...
Two reforms dominate every conversation about fixing the Supreme Court: term limits (ending life tenure in favor of fixed, staggered terms) and court expansion — usually called “court packing” by opponents — adding seats to the current nine. They get discussed together constantly and confused just as often. This page is the single, continuously updated reference for both: what they actually mean, the bills currently in Congress, whether they’re constitutional, what Americans actually think of each one, and how they stack up against each other. ...
On February 19, 1923, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that declared South Asians ineligible for U.S. citizenship. Nine unelected judges, in a single decision, stripped the legal standing of an entire people from the fabric of American law — and their ruling set off a cascade of consequences that ruined businesses, seized property, and drove at least one man to his death. Today is the 103rd anniversary of that decision. It deserves to be remembered — not just as a historical injustice, but as a precise illustration of why unchecked judicial power is dangerous, why the Court’s institutional consensus is no guarantee of moral correctness, and why structural reform is not optional. ...
Every election season, candidates for office get a break that ordinary advertisers do not. Federal law requires TV and radio stations to sell them airtime at the “lowest unit charge,” the cheapest rate the station gives any other customer. The point is to protect candidates from being priced out of reaching voters. Congress wrote that protection for “a legally qualified candidate.” This fall, the Supreme Court has twice used its emergency docket to keep it flowing to party committees, while a federal appeals court’s ruling that the law says otherwise sits on ice through the November 3 midterms. ...
On the morning of September 30, 2026, a federal appeals court did something courts are supposed to do when a person is hours from being put to death: it paused to think. By evening, the Supreme Court had told the appeals court to stop thinking. Its order in Nelsen v. Pike (No. 26A428) contained no reasoning. Tennessee then tried to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection, and the attempt failed. Pike, 50, survived. The sequence is a case study in what is wrong with how the Supreme Court handles life-and-death questions on its emergency docket. ...
Sitting justices almost never testify before Congress. It last happened with any regularity decades ago, and the institution has spent years treating its own internal workings as none of the legislature’s business. On July 14, 2026, that changed — Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett appeared before the House Appropriations Committee to defend a $921 million security budget request. They left having conceded, on the record, something the Court has spent years refusing to say plainly: it doesn’t have settled rules for how it uses the tool that now decides more cases than its actual docket. ...
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has a founding myth. It goes like this: unlike liberal justices who impose their policy preferences onto the Constitution, conservative justices are constrained by the original meaning of the text — what the Founders wrote, what the ratifiers understood. Originalism, in this telling, is not an ideology. It is a discipline. It is the difference between judges who follow the law and judges who make it up. It is a compelling story. It is also, the evidence shows, false. ...
Something has shifted in how Democrats talk about the Supreme Court — and it’s about time. For years, court reform was treated as a fringe idea. Expand the Court? Too radical. Term limits? Too destabilizing. A binding ethics code? Maybe, someday, if we can find the votes. The conventional wisdom held that the Court, however flawed, was too sacred an institution to touch with structural changes. That conventional wisdom is crumbling. And the redistricting and voting rights rulings of the past few months are exactly why. ...