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. ...