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Brett Kavanaugh (2019)

Associate justice since Oct. 6, 2018

← Back to overview View 2019 Disclosure PDF

Positions

Positions are those where a justice was an officer, director, trustee, partner, proprietor, representative, employee or consultant for any organization other than the U.S. government at the time the disclosure was filed.

Report Year Organization Title
2019 George Mason University Visiting professor of law
2019 Blessed Sacrament School Coach

7th-8th grade girls basketball team

2019 Blessed Sacrament School Coach

5th-6th grade girls basketball team

2019 Blessed Sacrament School Adviser, CYO sports advisory board

Agreements

Agreements include any agreements into which a justice has entered, such as employment contracts, continuing payments from former employers and continuing participation in employee welfare or benefit plans maintained by a former employer.

Year Organization Terms
2019 George Mason University Visiting professor of law, agreement to teach in 2019, 2020 and 2021

Noninvestment income

Noninvestment income includes compensation from jobs the justice has had, such as teaching roles; jobs at law firms before they were judges; pension benefits; and royalties for intellectual property, such as books and copyrights.

Date/Year Organization Name Amount Purpose
2019 George Mason University $12,500.04 Teaching

Spousal income

Spousal income includes earned income from jobs a justice’s spouse has held, as well as honoraria. Justices are required to report a spouse’s income that exceeded $1,000 but are not required to disclose specific amounts.

Source Description Amount
Chevy Chase Section 5 Salary

Town manager

Travel Reimbursements

Reimbursements include any payment or thing of value received to cover travel-related expenses for justices and their families. They can include expenses that the third party paid directly or for which a justice paid upfront and was reimbursed, but justices are not required to report reimbursements’ dollar values. Show more.

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Date Source Location Purpose Items Paid or Provided
Sept. 13 – 15, 2019 American Academy of Achievement New York, NY Speaking

Speak at achievement summit

Food, Lodging, Transportation
July 20 – Aug. 3, 2019 George Mason University Egham, United Kingdom Teaching

Teach two-credit class on creation of the Constitution

Food, Lodging, Transportation
May 6 – 8, 2019 Seventh Circuit Bar Association Milwaukee, WI Speaking

Speak at judicial conference of 7th Circuit

Food, Lodging, Transportation

Gifts

Gifts include gifts received by justices, their spouses or their dependent children from any source other than a relative. Justices are only required to disclose gifts whose aggregate value from the same source exceeds a certain threshold ($480 in 2023) within the reporting period and gifts that are individually worth more than 40% of that threshold. This only captures gifts that have been disclosed, which ProPublica reporting shows can be incomplete. Show more.

No gifts

Liabilities

Liabilities include debts that exceeded $10,000 at any time during the reporting period for justices, their spouses or their dependent children. Because justices have to report these each year, some debts may show up multiple times in the table. Show more.

No liabilities

Investments

Investments include cash accounts, property, stocks, investment funds, retirement plans and other financial instruments owned by justices, their spouses and dependent children in excess of certain value thresholds or generating more than $200 in income in a year. Justices are not required to disclose information about their personal residences unless they generate rental income.

ProPublica has not extracted investments data for 2019. For information about Brett Kavanaugh’s investments, view the filing.

Additional Information or Explanations

Additional information or explanations include a justice’s explanatory comments clarifying other portions of the report. These may include explanations of apparent inconsistencies with previous reports, third-party opinions on possible conflicts of interest or other supporting documentation.

No additional information or explanations

About The Data

The bulk of the data we used came from the Free Law Project, which maintains a database of more than 35,000 financial disclosure records for federal judges, justices and magistrates, most of it dating back to 2003. These disclosures, which federal employees are required to file each year under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, are maintained by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The law, however, requires most of them to be destroyed after six years, making many disclosures from earlier years hard to find. Our disclosures cover most of those filed since 2003, as well as some financial information disclosed by some justices during their Senate confirmations in 1990, 1991 and 2000. (Do you have information about a Supreme Court justice’s finances from before 2003? Email us.)

Because much of the data was extracted from PDFs using optical character recognition, we designed our own database and imported and cleaned the Free Law Project’s data to fix scanning and other errors. We corrected spelling errors, edited fields for style and clarity and, where possible, attempted to add contextual information by, for example, categorizing organizations and transactions, standardizing certain fields, updating entity names or filling in missing information.

In some cases, such as when the Free Law Project did not have a specific disclosure or had not extracted data from a report, we extracted or transcribed the data manually.

After cleaning and standardizing the data, we spot-checked it for accuracy, looking primarily for transcription or categorization errors. If you believe you see an error in the database, please contact us at [email protected].

More from Friends of the Court

ProPublica has reported that justices have sometimes failed to disclose speaking engagements and gifts like private jet travel and luxury vacations from wealthy and influential people. Read our series: Friends of the Court.

Do you have any tips on the courts? Contact us securely or reach out to ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan.

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