U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito failed to disclose a luxury fishing trip he took with billionaire Paul Singer, and then declined to recuse himself from cases involving the hedge fund founder, ProPublica alleges in a new report. At issue is a July 2008 trip in which Alito flew free on Singer’s private jet and stayed at a fishing lodge charging more than $1,000 per night. In the years following the trip, Singer’s hedge fund came before the Supreme Court at least 10 times, including in a bond default case decided in the fund’s favor, the watchdog group says. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Alito said he was not required to disclose the trip under rules in place at the time, adding that he did not know Singer was a party to some of the cases and never discussed pending litigation with him. Bloomberg News has a recap of the report’s findings, which also included allegations that Justice Antonin Scalia failed to report free jet travel and a stay at the same lodge in 2005.

The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld decades-old federal standards that give preferences to Native Americans and tribal members in the adoption or foster care placement of Native American children, rejecting a challenge that claimed that parts of the law were racially biased against non-Native Americans. Reuters reports that the 7-2 ruling threw out a lower court's decision that had struck down — as a violation of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law — a requirement that "other Indian families" receive preference in adoption and foster care after members of a child's extended family or tribe members.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Courts held a hearing today on U.S. Supreme Court ethics. Those testifying included George Mason University Law School Assistant Professor Jennifer Mascott, Hofstra University School of Law Professor James Sample, and Donald Sherman, chief counsel and executive vice president for Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics. The session comes on the heels of a full committee hearing last month into whether Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court itself should adopt a code of ethics for justices. Watch the proceeding on the committee’s website.

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 9-0 decision authored by Justice Elena Kagan today ruled in favor of Jack Daniel's in a trademark dispute with a dog accessory company that sold a parody chew toy resembling the distiller's widely recognized black-label whiskey bottle, reported Reuters. The ruling threw out a lower court's opinion that the pun-laden "Bad Spaniels" vinyl chew toy sold by VIP Products LLC is an "expressive work" protected by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. Kagan wrote that the 9th Circuit erred in applying the Rogers trademark test allowing for artistic relevance, concluding that "it is not appropriate when the accused infringer has used a trademark to designate the source of its own goods.” Read our previous coverage in TBA Today.

Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have received an extension to file their mandatory annual financial disclosure, Reuters reports. Seven of the nine justices disclosed their outside income and gifts from 2022. Food and other "personal hospitality" such as lodging at an individual's residence is generally exempt from disclosure, although the Judicial Conference, the policymaking body for the broader federal judiciary, has tightened its regulations related to the exemption, including requiring transport by private jet to be disclosed.

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling today affirmed a lower court's decision that an Alabama electoral map diluted the voting power of Black residents in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Reuters reports. The map was approved in 2021 by the Republican-controlled state legislature and featured one majority-Black district and six majority-white districts. In Thursday’s ruling, two consolidated cases before the Supreme Court involved challenges brought by Black voters and advocacy groups accusing Alabama of violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A three-judge federal court panel sided with the challengers in 2022, blocking the map as a "substantially likely" violation of Section 2 and ordering an additional district where Black voters make up "a voting-age majority or something quite close to it." Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a lower court's ruling that allowed the wife of Gorgi Talevski, a nursing home resident diagnosed with dementia, to sue Health and Hospital Corp of Marion County over claims it violated her husband’s civil rights, reported Reuters. The ruling preserved the ability of people to sue for civil rights violations under Section 1983, a law enacted as part of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to protect the rights of Black Americans by granting people the power to sue in federal court when state officials violate their constitutional or statutory rights. In a 2019 lawsuit, Gorgi’s wife, Ivanka Talevski, said her husband was subjected to harmful psychotropic drugs and unlawfully transferred to an all-male facility. He died in 2021, while the litigation was pending.

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 9-0 decision today threw out a lower court's ruling that said pharmacy chains owned by Safeway Inc. and SuperValu Inc. could not be held responsible for fraud in whistleblower cases, reported Reuters. Whistleblowers had accused the companies of defrauding Medicare and Medicaid programs by offering prescription drugs at discounted prices to customers paying out of pocket, while charging higher rates to the government. Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said the whistleblowers had shown evidence that executives knew the discounted prices should have been reported and took steps to hide the lower prices from state and federal authorities.

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 today to overturn a decision by the Washington Supreme Court that said a lawsuit filed by concrete company Glacier Northwest Inc. against a local affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was preempted by the National Labor Relations Act, reported Reuters. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said the union’s failure to protect the company’s property before striking "posed a risk of foreseeable, aggravated and imminent harm to Glacier's trucks." Glacier is seeking to bypass federal labor law and sue the union in state court for the destruction of property caused by striking workers. The Biden administration had urged the justices to reverse the lower court's decision, allowing Glacier Northwest's lawsuit to proceed.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by child pornography victims to overcome a legal shield in a case involving a class action lawsuit accusing Reddit Inc. of violating federal law by failing to rid the discussion website of this illegal content, reported Reuters. The justices turned away the appeal of a lower court's decision to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that Reddit was shielded by U.S. statute Section 230, which safeguards internet companies from lawsuits for content posted by users but has an exception for claims involving child sex trafficking.