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. ...
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. ...
In December 2025, bulldozers demolished the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for a new ballroom — a roughly $300 million construction project undertaken without congressional authorization, without the historic-preservation review federal law normally requires, and without the president’s earlier promise that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for it. A preservation group sued to stop it. On August 31, 2026, the Supreme Court let construction continue. Here’s the detail worth sitting with: the Court didn’t rule the project was legal. It ruled that the people suing weren’t allowed to ask. ...
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. ...
For sixty years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the main legal tool minority voters have to challenge maps that dilute their political power — the thing that forces states to draw a second majority-Black district when residential segregation and racially polarized voting mean one district isn’t enough to give Black voters a real chance to elect anyone. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court redefined what it takes to win that kind of claim, in a way that Justice Kagan says renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” ...
Grants Pass, Oregon has a population of about 38,000 people and, at last count, nowhere near enough shelter beds for its unhoused residents. The city’s answer to that shortfall wasn’t more beds. It was a set of ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside with so much as a blanket, and jailed repeat offenders — including people who had nowhere else to legally exist. In June 2024, the Supreme Court said that was perfectly constitutional. ...
Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench on June 30, 2026 — a step justices reserve for cases where they want the disagreement on the public record, not just in print. Her summary of what the majority had just done: “the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” She was describing a ruling that let states ban transgender girls from school sports teams without ever resolving the central factual dispute the case turned on. ...
Federal law caps how much an individual donor can give directly to a candidate at $7,000. That limit exists for an obvious reason: a candidate who owes their campaign to one wealthy check is a candidate who answers to that donor first. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court opened a door around that limit large enough to drive a truck through — by ruling that political parties can spend essentially unlimited amounts in direct coordination with the candidates they’re backing. ...
Most posts on this site are about the Supreme Court taking a right away. This one isn’t — mostly. On June 29, 2026, the Court ruled that “geofence warrants,” the increasingly common police tactic of asking Google to hand over location data for every phone that passed near a crime scene, count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That means police actually have to get a real warrant, based on real evidence connecting a real suspect to a real crime, before casting the net. It’s a genuine win for digital privacy. It’s also a 6-3 decision, which means three sitting justices were prepared to let the practice continue unchecked — and their reasoning is worth understanding, because it’s the same reasoning that could gut this protection the next time the facts are less sympathetic. ...
The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is one sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It was ratified in 1868. The Supreme Court interpreted it — clearly, and with essentially the meaning everyone has understood it to have for over a century — in 1898. Nobody seriously disputed what it meant for 128 years. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that meaning and struck down Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and temporary-visa immigrants. That’s the good news. The bad news is what it took to get there, and what three sitting justices were willing to argue in order to reach the opposite conclusion. ...