Left-wing watchdog groups have spent years targeting Justice Samuel Alito.
Now a blockbuster lawsuit just lost one of its most consequential potential votes — one week before oral arguments.
And Alito’s explanation for stepping aside points straight to Martha-Ann Alito and a family inheritance that nobody saw coming into this fight.
What Alito Said — and What He Didn’t Say at First
Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County — a landmark case pitting Boulder, Colorado against energy giants Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil. The recusal landed with no public explanation, just a terse one-sentence letter from Supreme Court Clerk Scott S. Harris informing the parties that Alito “has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case.”
Days later, Alito broke his silence in an interview with Bloomberg Supreme Court reporter Greg Stohr. “Taking into account the particular arguments that were made on both sides here, I thought that recusal was the prudent step,” Alito told Stohr. He called the decision “a difficult judgement call” and confirmed that the Supreme Court’s own legal office had told him recusal was not required.
Then came the part that made headlines everywhere. Alito explained that his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, inherited the energy shares and that she wants to keep them. “She wants to hold on to individual stock, and so we have stock holdings in some companies in the oil and gas field,” the justice said.
Before Alito spoke publicly, a court spokeswoman had told NBC News that “Justice Alito does not have a financial interest in any party” in the case and that the court’s legal counsel had confirmed “his recusal is not required.” He spent months resisting calls to step aside. Then, in the week leading up to oral arguments, he reversed course.
The Stocks, the Inheritance, and the Scrutiny That Followed
Alito does not own stock in either Suncor Energy or ExxonMobil — the two companies Boulder named in its suit.
But his 2025 financial disclosures show holdings in a string of other energy firms, including ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. According to his disclosures, his ConocoPhillips investment ran up to $15,000 and his Phillips 66 holdings fell between $15,001 and $50,000.
The advocacy group Consumer Watchdog had spent months pressing for his recusal, pointing out that ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 both face climate lawsuits similar to the Boulder case.
The group argued those companies warned their own shareholders for years that climate litigation posed financial risks — and that at least one of those companies appears as a defendant in every climate case currently stayed pending the outcome of Suncor v. Boulder.
The roots of those holdings trace back to a family loss. After Martha-Ann Alito’s father, Bobby Gene Bomgardner, died in 2012, the Alito family inherited dozens of stocks — including Chevron shares — along with investment accounts and mineral rights in Oklahoma, according to a 2013 Associated Press report. That inheritance had prompted Justice Alito to recuse from dozens of other matters involving companies whose shares his family had acquired.
Martha-Ann Alito also leased oil and gas rights covering 160 acres in Grady County, Oklahoma, to Citizen Energy III in 2022, according to reporting by The Intercept. That agreement entitled her to three-sixteenths of the proceeds from oil and gas produced there, though she held no ownership stake in Citizen Energy itself.
Federal law generally requires federal judges to disqualify themselves when they or their spouses hold a financial interest in a party to a proceeding. The legal question hanging over this case is whether holdings in non-party companies that could benefit indirectly from a ruling trigger a similar obligation — and Alito’s own legal office said the answer was no.
What Losing Alito Could Mean for the Case Itself
Alito’s exit matters because the Court now hears Suncor v. Boulder with only eight justices. That raises the prospect of a 4-4 deadlock. If the Court splits evenly, the Colorado Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling — which allowed Boulder’s lawsuit against Suncor and ExxonMobil to proceed — would stand without a Supreme Court decision on the merits.
Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the recusal “raises the possibility that the Colorado Supreme Court decision might be affirmed without decision by an equally divided 4-4 U.S. Supreme Court.”
Legal analysts widely viewed Alito as one of the justices most likely to side with the energy companies on preemption grounds. Jonathan H. Adler, Tazewell Taylor professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, told the DCNF that “the timing is something of a surprise, but the underlying decision less so because Alito has recused from cases involving energy companies in the past due to his stock holdings.”
And the stakes stretch well beyond Boulder. The Colorado Supreme Court allowed Boulder’s lawsuit against Suncor and ExxonMobil to move forward in 2025, setting up a showdown over whether states can use their own tort laws to extract damages from energy companies for alleged climate-related harms tied to emissions produced around the world.
State court judges across the country have stayed at least eleven similar climate cases pending the outcome of this dispute — including lawsuits brought by California, New Jersey, Delaware, Hoboken, and eight California cities and counties.
Suncor and ExxonMobil argue that Boulder is effectively trying to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through state tort law, a power they say Congress reserved for the federal government under the Clean Air Act.
Boulder and the county filed the original lawsuit in 2018, alleging the energy companies deceived consumers about the harms of burning fossil fuels and demanding that they share the costs of adapting to climate change.
The case asks whether federal law preempts those state-law claims entirely — a question with nine-figure financial implications for the energy industry and for the city and county governments that have lined up behind similar theories.
But here is something worth sitting with: the groups screaming loudest about Alito’s stock holdings in energy companies are frequently the same groups that want the federal government to strangle domestic oil and gas production through regulation.
They spent years calling for his recusal to remove what they considered a hostile vote. Now they got it. And the result could be a 4-4 tie that lets Boulder’s lawsuit live without the Court ever ruling on whether states actually have the power to do what Boulder is trying to do.
That’s not a clean win for the climate litigation crowd — a tied Court sets no precedent. But it’s better than a 5-4 ruling shutting the door on climate tort suits in state courts everywhere. They’ll take it.
The broader question this case forces into the open — whether states can use their own courts to impose billions in liability on energy companies for emissions produced across the entire globe — remains one of the most consequential legal questions facing American energy production. A full ruling from the Court would have answered it. Now that answer may get delayed until another case winds its way up through the system.
And for Alito, the cost of keeping his wife’s inherited stocks turns out to be missing the first argument of the new Supreme Court term in a case that could reshape American energy law for a generation.
Sources: Daily Caller, Bloomberg Law (via Volokh Conspiracy), Daily Caller News Foundation, Consumer Watchdog, The Intercept, Associated Press, NBC News
