Too early to say whether lack of luxury perks uncovered means the ethics code is working

Fix the Court is releasing an updated list of the gifts Supreme Court justices have received over the last several years. With the addition of the 185 post-2004 gifts we identified — largely thanks to open records requests, the justices’ recent financial disclosures, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Dec. 2024 ethics report and a decision to include honorary degrees — the tally now stands at 515 gifts received with an estimated value of $3.62 million since Jan. 1, 2004, up from 330 gifts valued at $3.13 million in our June 2024 tally.

In total, the number of gifts accepted by the current nine justices, plus the eight who’ve most recently left the court (Rehnquist, Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer), stands at 735, with an estimated value of $4.69 million, including 219 new ones. That’s up from 516 gifts valued at $4.25 million.

The justices have accepted at least 37 gifts valued at an estimated $16,588 since they released a Code of Conduct in late 2023. On the positive side, all gifts valued above the reporting threshold were included in their 2024-2025 disclosures. (Track the frequent IAD and DCA stops for Harlan Crow’s jet, and you may reach a different conclusion.) In any event, FTC maintains that the justices should pay for the bulk of these items and perks, like artwork or concert tickets, and that it’s too early to say whether the recent lack of luxury gifts on FDRs indicates the Code of Conduct has been effective.” Canon 4D(3) — “A Justice should comply with the [Judicial Conference’s] restrictions on acceptance of gifts…” — means little when those restrictions are minimal.

Fix the Court continues to support the High Court Gift Ban Act and the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, both of which would require SCOTUS and the lower courts to adopt the congressional rule prohibiting acceptance of gifts valued at more than $50.

“Public confidence in the Supreme Court is at a historic low, due in part to concerns about the justices’ ethical standards,” FTC’s Gabe Roth said. “Refraining from accepting a legion of benefits would be an important step the justices could take toward restoring some of that confidence.”

Justice Thomas remains the most prolific gift recipient among the justices by a wide margin, having accepted 206 gifts valued at an estimated $4.02 million overall, including 130 since 2004 valued at an estimated $3.06 million. Thomas also reports his gifts on his disclosures less frequently than any other justice. Of those 130 gifts, 120 were above the gift-reporting threshold, but he disclosed only 14, or 11.7 percent, of them.

Justice Scalia was the second most prolific gift-receiver in terms of value, receiving an estimated $219,179 overall across 93 gifts and $181,756 (61 gifts) since 2004. He also had the second most difficulty reporting his gifts, disclosing only 16 of his 48 post-2004 gifts above the reporting threshold, or 33.3 percent.

Excluding those two justices, the rest reported 89.7 percent of their threshold-surpassing post-2004 gifts (113 of 126) on their disclosures. (We gave the justices credit for reporting gifts even when they placed them in the reimbursements section of their disclosures.)

Methodology:
Over the past year, Fix the Court staff reached out to dozens of organizations that provided the justices with gifts to inquire about their values, including those numbers when they responded via email or open records request. When they didn’t respond, we opted to give the justices the benefit of the doubt and assign a $249 value for gifts like trophies and statuettes, which means that whenever they received the item, they wouldn’t have had to report it on their disclosure. (The gift-reporting threshold started at $250 after the Ethics in Government Act went into effect in 1981 and has risen over time to $525 this year.)

Elsewhere, we calculated values based on, for example, the size of a yacht or private jet, or the value of merchandise members of the public could purchase, such as a personalized Louisville Slugger bat or a Texas football jersey. We included honorary degrees for the first time because they typically come with a physical item, like a hood or diploma, that was easy to identify in graduation ceremony photos. We also added them because any future gift-ban legislation or self-imposed gift-acceptance rule will necessarily have exceptions (cf., these examples), and hoods and diplomas would seem to qualify.

The Justice Thomas vacations and Justice Scalia hunting trips that were added appeared in the 2024 Senate Judiciary report. Even so, it’s worth mentioning the possibility that one or more of the justices may still be erroneously omitting, say, resort stays where the resort is owned by an LLC and not a person, thus not qualifying for the personal hospitality exemption. FTC will investigate this further in the fall.

Fix the Court stands by the assertion that the numbers above likely remain undercounts. To name but two examples where we assume an item was a gift but did not include it because we lacked confirmation by press time: the bronze Myers Anderson bust in Justice Thomas’ chambers and the clothes Justice Jackson wore in her Essence photo shoot are not on our list. Along those lines, we recently asked the SCOTUS press office to ask Justice Breyer why he views (present tense) all of his Pritzker Prize trips as reimbursements and not gifts but haven’t heard back.

FTC in the spring and summer submitted more than two dozen open records requests to public universities that have provided the justices with free travel and/or gifts in recent years. Documents have been coming in every few days this summer; we plan to release a comprehensive report next month and update the gift tally accordingly.

Additional information:
When crunching the numbers, we sometimes separated gifts or single-counted them. For example, “meals and lodging” counts as two gifts, round-trip airfare on a private jet counts as two gifts and the regalia for an honorary doctorate (some combination of a hood, a diploma or another keepsake like a tassel) counts as one gift.

Why the Jan. 1, 2004 cutoff? First, no complete repository exists for the justices’ pre-2004 disclosures. Under federal law, the Court may destroy FDRs after six years, which apparently happened. We obtained a few 2000-2003 disclosures from former Supreme Court reporters like Tony Mauro, and we posted them online or sent them to the Free Law Project for posting, but most remain missing. Second, this L.A. Times article concerning gifts received between 1998 and 2003 came out in 2004 and is seen as the turning point in reporting on justices’ gifts.

In June 2024, just before the 2023 disclosures were released, we identified 344 gifts the justices accepted between Jan. 1, 2004, and Dec. 31, 2023, valued at $2.99 million, though today these numbers have been revised to 330 gifts valued at $3.13 million due to double-counting some gifts and moving some pre-2004 flights and tickets to the post-2004 tally.