« Legal Time Travel | Main | 13th Annual Junior Federal Courts Workshop »

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Congress Isn't the Boss of Him

My new essay on The Daily Beast explains how Justice Samuel Alito made a point of breaking his written commitment to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the standard for recusals, going out of his way to show that Congress isn't the boss of him. Here is the gist:

On April 25, all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court signed a Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices, which they submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“In regard to recusal,” the justices unanimously declared that they “follow the same general principles and statutory standards as other federal judges.”

It took Justice Samuel Alito less than five months to renege on his written commitment to his colleagues and the public. In a four-page statement issued on Sept. 8, Alito declined to recuse himself from a major tax case, without a single citation, reference, or acknowledgement of either the federal recusal statute or the “general principles” that he had so recently agreed to follow.

Instead of applying statutory law or Supreme Court precedents, Alito invented an entirely new rule, never before invoked by any justice.

You can read the entire piece at The Daily Beast.

Posted by Steve Lubet on September 26, 2023 at 04:09 AM | Permalink

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.