Justice Scalia had been invited to the ranch by John Poindexter, owner of a Texas manufacturing firm. One of Mr. Poindexter’s companies, the Mic Group, had been the defendant in an age discrimination lawsuit by a former employee who had unsuccessfully sought review by the Supreme Court the year before.
But Justice Scalia was hardly alone in accepting privately paid trips. From 2004 to 2014, Justice Stephen G. Breyer took 185 such trips, according to a database by the Center for Responsive Politics.
The issue of privately paid travel also emerged in 2011, a year after the landmark campaign finance case Citizens United, which allowed unlimited corporate spending in elections. A liberal advocacy group, Common Cause, argued that Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from hearing the case because they traveled to a political conference in Palm Springs, Calif., sponsored by the businessman Charles G. Koch, one of the biggest donors to Republicans.
Legal experts greeted this month’s move with cautious optimism.
“In my world of transparency and judicial ethics, what we had until now was little more than a joke,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in legal ethics. “The rules were very lax and tolerated circumvention, and now we’ve taken a giant step away from that.”
However, he said there was still a long way to go toward transparency and accountability, pointing to the lag time between when a gift is received and when it must be reported. Justices have until May 15 of the year after receiving a gift before they must report it.
In theory, if a justice “knowingly and willfully” failed to comply with the rules, the attorney general could bring a case. In practice, though, he said, that has never happened. He added that it was also impossible to know how individual justices would respond to the stricter rules.
“There’s no enforcement mechanism at the Supreme Court,” he said. “It will be up to each justice.”
