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. ...
The Conflict No One Will Enforce Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is not a private citizen who happened to marry a Supreme Court justice. She is a professional conservative activist who spent months working to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election—texting the White House chief of staff, emailing swing-state legislators, and attending the rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol attack. Her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, then participated in Supreme Court cases directly related to that effort. He was the lone dissenter when the Court allowed the House January 6 Committee to obtain Trump White House documents. He participated in cases involving the immunity of the man whose election her efforts sought to restore. He never recused himself from a single related matter. ...
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. ...
Conservative media is questioning whether a federal judge should recuse himself from a case because he once donated to a legal aid nonprofit. Meanwhile, Supreme Court justices have accepted millions in undisclosed gifts from billionaires with cases before the Court—and faced no consequences. The disparity reveals everything wrong with our current approach to judicial ethics. The “Scandal” That Isn’t Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota is facing scrutiny for threatening to hold ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons in contempt of court. The case involves whether an Ecuadoran national detained by ICE should have received a bond hearing within seven days. ...
When Access Journalism Becomes Propaganda CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford recently declared that the Supreme Court corruption narrative is “dangerous” and “patently false”. Her defense of Justices Thomas and Alito: the Court is simply “conservative,” and criticism of its decisions doesn’t equal corruption. This is gaslighting disguised as legal analysis. ...
Two Justices, Millions in Gifts, Zero Consequences In December 2024, after 20 months of investigation, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a devastating 95-page report documenting what it called an “ethical crisis at the Supreme Court.” The findings were damning: Justice Clarence Thomas “accepted lavish gifts from billionaires with business before the court for almost his entire tenure as a justice,” with gifts of a “number, value, and extravagance” that have “no comparison in modern American history.” ...
The Only Court in America Without Enforceable Ethics Rules Here’s a fact that should shock every American: The Supreme Court’s nine justices are the only federal judicial officers who are not subject to a specific and binding code of ethics. Every other federal judge in America—from district courts to circuit courts of appeals—faces enforceable ethical rules and potential discipline for violations. All fifty state supreme courts subject their justices to ethics reviews with real consequences. ...
The United States Is Alone When defenders of the Supreme Court’s current structure argue that reform would be “radical” or “unprecedented,” they’re counting on Americans not knowing how other democracies structure their highest courts. The truth? The United States is a global outlier—and not in a good way. Among major democracies, the United States is alone in providing life tenure for members of its highest court. Alone in having no mandatory retirement age. Alone in having no enforceable ethics code with real consequences. ...
A Justice Who Believes He’s Above Accountability Justice Samuel Alito presents himself as a principled originalist who respects precedent and follows the highest ethical standards. The reality is starkly different. Alito accepted luxury trips worth over $100,000 from a billionaire who later had cases before the Court—and didn’t disclose them. He flew insurrection flags at his homes and refused to recuse from January 6 cases. He told a Senator during confirmation hearings that precedent was “settled,” then systematically dismantled 50 years of abortion rights. He secretly recorded telling an activist that America must “return to a place of godliness.” ...
A Supreme Court Justice for Sale For over 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury gifts from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow valued at more than $4.75 million. Private jet trips across the globe. Lavish yacht vacations. A quarter-million-dollar RV he never fully paid for. Private school tuition for a family member. Real estate deals. And he disclosed almost none of it. ...
When Words Ring Hollow Chief Justice John Roberts released his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary, and it’s a remarkable document—not for what it says, but for what it so carefully avoids saying. Roberts chose to focus on Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and the Declaration of Independence, waxing eloquent about America’s founding principles and the judiciary’s sacred duty to decide cases “faithfully and impartially.” It’s a beautiful sentiment. It’s also utterly disconnected from the reality of the Supreme Court he leads. ...