Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments at decent salaries. They don’t need to own and sell individual stocks.
A new report about Justice Samuel Alito is a reminder of the unnecessary issues that doing so can cause.
To be clear, I’m not referring to The New York Times report about an inverted flag outside Alito’s home after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which raised questions about his ability to serve impartially in pivotal pending appeals.
Instead, this later report addresses Alito’s apparent sale of Bud Light-maker Anheuser-Busch stock — and his possibly related purchase of Molson Coors stock — in the wake of an anti-trans Bud Light boycott last year. Chris Geidner, who wrote the stock-related report for Law Dork exploring Alito’s possible boycott participation, observed:
Participating in a boycott is undeniably a political statement. And there are pending cases for which participation in an anti-trans beer boycott could be seen as his having a finger on the scale of justice on the side of the anti-trans advocates supporting — and in some cases, defending — these laws such that recusal could be required.
Alito didn’t respond to Geidner for his report, which quoted watchdog Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth as saying that it’s “possible the sale was innocuous, or not related to the controversy, but given Alito’s priors, he’s lost the benefit of the doubt in my view.”
Whatever Alito’s intentions, this is an issue of the justice’s own making. There’s no need for justices to own and sell individual stocks — as opposed to, say, investing in mutual funds if they want to avoid these sorts of recusal questions. Most justices seem to abide by this, though Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts and the now-retired Justice Stephen Breyer are three members of the court known for their stock ownership in recent years. Alito and the court have enough (self-imposed) problems. This is an easy one to solve. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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