Supreme Court struggle to spot conflict laid bare in Alito trip

Bloomberg Law quotes Brandon Szerwo in a story about the U.S. Supreme Court highlighting the difficulty of personal conflicts of interest, as corporate disclosure rules primarily target financial conflicts. Identifying business ownerships of court participants is a responsibility of all federal courts, requiring nongovernmental corporations to note any parent corporation or any publicly held company owning 10% or more of the corporation’s stock. Szerwo notes part of the reason entities have to register to do business in a state is so this information can be found, but other corporations can be listed as the owner. “There is some degree of difficulty in this, especially if the ultimate benefactor wants to remain anonymous or at least make it a little more difficult to detect their ownership or interest,” Szerwo told Bloomberg.