Justice Samuel Alito will not step aside from a forthcoming Supreme Court case pitting ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy against Colorado's climate-damage lawsuit — even though he recused himself from an earlier stage of the same litigation in 2023. NBC News reports a Court spokeswoman attributed that earlier recusal to an inadvertent scheduling overlap with cases involving companies Alito does own stock in: ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66.
Said Gabe Roth of Fix the Court: "Justice Alito shouldn't own these stocks to begin with."
Said Hannah Story Brown of the Revolving Door Project: "The oil company petitioners in these cases have been explicit in court filings that they view the cases as linked; there is no reason for Justice Alito to view them otherwise."
The sharpest fact in this story is not that Alito is refusing to recuse — it’s that he already did, once, in the same case.
In 2023, when the Court turned away an early appeal from ExxonMobil and Suncor in the Colorado climate lawsuit, Alito did not participate. The Court spokeswoman now says that recusal was “inadvertent” — triggered because the Colorado case was bundled with parallel appeals from ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, companies in which Alito holds stock. Remove the overlap, the logic goes, and the conflict disappears.
But the companies themselves have argued in court filings that all these climate-liability cases are legally intertwined. The Colorado case, set for argument in the October 2025 term, asks whether energy companies can use federal law to extinguish state-court climate suits. A ruling favoring ExxonMobil and Suncor would almost certainly benefit ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 in their own pending litigation — companies Alito demonstrably has a financial stake in.
The Court’s 2023 ethics code — itself a belated concession to years of reporting on undisclosed travel and gifts — does require recusal when a justice’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the same guidelines instruct justices they have a “duty to sit” because, unlike the federal circuit courts, a recused Supreme Court justice cannot be replaced by another judge. The tension between those two provisions has historically been resolved by individual justices acting as judges of their own conflicts, a structural problem that predates the current Court but has grown more visible under it.
The last serious congressional attempt to impose external recusal standards on the Supreme Court dates to the early 1970s, when pressure following Abe Fortas’s resignation over financial entanglements produced new disclosure rules but no binding recusal mechanism for the high court. What Congress left in place was an honor system. That system’s credibility depends entirely on the perceived impartiality of the justices invoking it.
The symmetric point is worth making plainly: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not participate in the Harvard affirmative-action case in 2023 because of her prior service on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, while participating in the legally parallel University of North Carolina case. That’s the existing standard applied consistently — and it still rests on individual judgment rather than enforceable rules.
Alito’s most recent financial disclosure confirms holdings in ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and five other energy-sector firms. He holds no stock in ExxonMobil or Suncor, the named parties in the Colorado case. Under current statutory interpretation — as Fix the Court’s Roth acknowledged — “stock ownership in one oil company does not require recusal in every case involving the oil industry.”
But the argument for recusal here doesn’t rest on industry-wide contamination. It rests on the specific legal question before the Court: if the justices block state climate suits broadly, every oil-sector holding benefits. The financial line between “party to this case” and “beneficiary of this ruling” is exactly where the current ethics framework goes silent.
The Senate Judiciary Committee letter, signed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Alliance for Justice among others, asks for an investigation — not a binding order, which the Committee cannot issue. The real lever is legislation. Roth’s call for a congressional ban on individual stock ownership by federal judges is the concrete ask; it has bipartisan nominal support and has gone nowhere for three consecutive Congresses. The Colorado climate case will be argued and decided before any such bill becomes law.