ProPublica 'Supreme Connections' - Track Financials
Overview & Context
The ProPublica “Supreme Connections” database is a public, searchable repository of Supreme Court justices’ financial disclosures, facilitating the tracing of ties between justices and corporations, billionaire donors, and organizations. 🏛️
🔍 Key Features
- Aggregates disclosures from 2003 onward—covering gifts, travel reimbursements, speaking fees, and investments across multiple justices.
- Includes retroactive disclosure updates, such as Clarence Thomas’s missing 1990s filings, and Samuel Alito’s 2023 filings, saving record data that would otherwise have been destroyed.
- Enables users to search by justice, donor, organization, or type of connection, streamlining transparency research.
🎯 Purpose and Framing
- Developed to increase transparency in the judiciary by making it easy for the public to identify potential conflicts of interest.
- Part of ProPublica’s broader “Friends of the Court” reporting series highlighting how dark money and elite influence penetrate the highest court.
🌐 Broader Significance
- Supports growing calls for judicial ethics reform, including Supreme Court code of conduct updates recommended after investigative findings.
- Complements awards-winning journalism—recognized by multiple Pulitzers—involving oversight of justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
📚 Citation
ProPublica Data Team. (n.d.). Supreme Connections. Retrieved from https://projects.propublica.org/supreme‑connections/
Summary generated by ChatGPT (GPT‑4).