The six conservative Supreme Court justices are Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Together they form a 6-3 supermajority that has reshaped American law on abortion, guns, affirmative action, and the regulatory power of federal agencies since Barrett’s confirmation in 2020. They are not interchangeable. They differ in how far they push, which principles they prioritize, and how often they break from one another in close cases.
What Conservative Means on This Court
Describing a justice as conservative here points to a judicial philosophy more than a political party. Two frameworks dominate the current wing. Originalism treats the Constitution’s meaning as fixed when its provisions were ratified, interpreted according to how people at the time understood the words. Textualism applies a parallel idea to statutes: judges follow the plain meaning of the language rather than guessing at congressional purpose or desired outcomes.
Most of the six are both. Where they diverge is temperament. Thomas treats originalism as a mandate to revisit any precedent that got the original meaning wrong. Roberts weighs the institutional cost of overturning settled law even when he thinks earlier courts erred. That difference, repeated across six justices, produces the splits you see in close cases.
John Roberts
Chief Justice John Roberts took his seat on September 29, 2005, nominated by President George W. Bush.1Supreme Court of the United States. About the Court – Current Members He had served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and clerked for William Rehnquist earlier in his career.2George W. Bush White House Archives. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
Roberts is the most institutionally cautious member of the conservative bloc. He consistently prioritizes the Court’s legitimacy and public credibility, and he prefers narrow rulings that resolve the case at hand without rewriting broad areas of law. That instinct has sometimes separated him from his conservative colleagues. He voted twice to uphold the Affordable Care Act and sided with the liberal justices on several high-profile cases during the 2019-2020 term. After Justice Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018, Roberts briefly became the Court’s median voter. That dynamic shifted once Barrett joined and the other five conservatives could form a majority without him.
Roberts wrote the 6-3 majority opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), which overruled the 40-year-old Chevron deference framework. Courts must now exercise independent judgment when interpreting federal statutes rather than deferring to agency readings of ambiguous language.3Supreme Court of the United States. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo A sweeping outcome, delivered in restrained prose. That’s Roberts.
Clarence Thomas
Justice Clarence Thomas has served since October 23, 1991, making him the longest-serving current justice by a wide margin. President George H.W. Bush nominated him to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall.4Justia. Justice Clarence Thomas He spent eight years as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Reagan and briefly sat on the D.C. Circuit.5U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Clarence Thomas
Thomas is the most aggressive originalist on the Court. Where others might acknowledge a precedent was wrongly decided but leave it standing for stability’s sake, Thomas will openly call for it to be overturned. His concurring opinions read like historical dissertations, tracing provisions back to founding-era documents and English common law. He has questioned the constitutional footing of everything from qualified immunity to the modern scope of the Commerce Clause.
Thomas wrote the 6-3 majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which struck down New York’s requirement that concealed-carry applicants show a special need for self-defense. The opinion established a new test: when the Second Amendment’s text covers an individual’s conduct, the government can justify restricting it only by pointing to a historical tradition of analogous firearms regulation.6Supreme Court of the United States. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen Courts now evaluate gun laws through that historical lens rather than a balancing test.
Thomas has faced scrutiny over undisclosed gifts. A Senate Judiciary Committee investigation found he accepted nearly $4.2 million worth of gifts over two decades, including private jet travel and yacht excursions from Republican donor Harlan Crow, much of it not reported on mandatory financial disclosure forms.7United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Durbin Reveals Omissions of Gifted Private Travel to Justice Clarence Thomas from Harlan Crow Those revelations contributed to the Court adopting its first formal Code of Conduct in November 2023.
Samuel Alito
Justice Samuel Alito joined the Court on January 31, 2006, nominated by President George W. Bush. He had served as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey and spent over a decade on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.8George W. Bush White House Archives. Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. At 76, he is one of the Court’s oldest members, with no public indication of retirement plans.
Alito is the conservative justice least likely to cross ideological lines. His jurisprudence sits firmly to the right of the Court’s center, and he has never joined all four liberal justices in a 5-4 decision. Two themes dominate his opinions: deep commitment to protecting religious exercise, and willingness to revisit precedents he views as historically ungrounded.
Alito wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the most consequential conservative ruling in a generation. It overturned both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, and returned the issue to state legislatures.9Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization Within months, roughly half the states had banned or severely restricted abortion access.
On religious liberty, Alito authored the majority in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014), which allowed closely held for-profit corporations to be exempted from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate when compliance would violate the owners’ religious beliefs. He has argued consistently that religious practice deserves heightened protection, including criticizing pandemic-era restrictions on houses of worship as discriminatory.
Neil Gorsuch
Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the Court on April 10, 2017, nominated by President Donald Trump to fill the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.10Justia. Justice Neil Gorsuch He had served over a decade on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he wrote more than 200 opinions.11Congress.gov. PN55 – Nomination of Neil M. Gorsuch for Supreme Court of the United States
Gorsuch is the Court’s most committed textualist. He insists that judges follow the ordinary meaning of statutory language regardless of whether the result aligns with their policy preferences. That commitment produces results that don’t always fit neatly on a left-right spectrum. In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion holding that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination protects gay and transgender workers. The reasoning was pure textualism: firing someone for being attracted to the same sex requires considering their sex, which is exactly what the statute prohibits.
His other signature area is skepticism toward federal agency power. He has been the most vocal justice pushing to limit agency rulemaking, and his concurrence in Loper Bright went further than Roberts’s majority in criticizing the history of Chevron deference.
Gorsuch breaks most visibly from fellow conservatives on tribal sovereignty and criminal law. He authored the 5-4 majority in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), joined by the four liberal justices, holding that a large portion of eastern Oklahoma remained Indian country under federal law because Congress had never formally disestablished the Creek Nation’s reservation.12Supreme Court of the United States. McGirt v. Oklahoma Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh all dissented. His years on the Tenth Circuit, which encompasses 76 federally recognized tribes, gave him an unusually deep background in federal Indian law, and his commitment to honoring treaty language as written tracks directly with his textualist principles.
Brett Kavanaugh
Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed in October 2018, nominated by President Donald Trump. He spent over a decade on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals before his elevation.13Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Justice Brett Kavanaugh Earlier, he spent five and a half years in the George W. Bush White House, with three years as Staff Secretary managing the flow of policy documents to the President and participating in drafting executive orders and legislation.
That executive branch experience gives Kavanaugh a practical perspective on separation of powers that shows up regularly in his opinions. He has written extensively about protecting presidential authority from what he views as excessive interference. In law review articles before joining the Court, he argued that sitting presidents should not face criminal prosecution or investigation, reasoning that the constitutional remedy for presidential misconduct is impeachment rather than the criminal justice system.
On the bench, Kavanaugh tends to sit in the middle of the conservative wing. He and Roberts are the two conservative justices most likely to find common ground with the liberal bloc in close cases. He focuses heavily on statutory text and has built a reputation for meticulous, narrowly drawn opinions. He is less interested in overturning precedent than Thomas or Alito, and more likely to write concurrences that signal where he thinks the law is heading without taking the leap in the current case.
Amy Coney Barrett
Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed on October 26, 2020, nominated by President Donald Trump.14United States Senate. U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 116th Congress – 2nd Session She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia from 1998 to 1999 and spent over 15 years as a law professor at Notre Dame Law School, teaching constitutional law and federal courts, before serving on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.15Congress.gov. Judge Amy Coney Barrett
Her clerkship with Scalia shaped her originalist approach, but she has carved out a distinct identity. She is more willing than Scalia was to engage with critics of originalism on their own terms, and her academic background shows in opinions that methodically walk through competing interpretive theories before arriving at a conclusion. Her writing tends to be clearer and more accessible than what the Court typically produces.
Barrett authored the 6-3 majority opinion in Trump v. CASA, Inc. (2025), which held that federal district courts likely lack the power to issue universal injunctions, meaning orders that block government policies nationwide rather than just for the parties in the case.16Supreme Court of the United States. Trump v. CASA, Inc. The decision ended a practice both Democratic and Republican administrations had complained about for years. Critics argued it significantly weakened the judiciary’s ability to check executive overreach.
On administrative law, Barrett has taken a nuanced position on the major questions doctrine, which requires Congress to speak clearly before agencies can take actions of great economic or political significance. In a notable concurrence, she acknowledged the criticism that the doctrine is hard to reconcile with textualism and proposed grounding it instead in a common-sense theory of language: principals don’t authorize agents to take major actions through vague, general instructions.
How the Six Actually Split
Treating the conservative wing as a single voting bloc misses important fault lines. In practice, it splits into roughly two camps.
Thomas and Alito are the Court’s most reliably right-leaning pair, rarely crossing ideological lines and frequently pushing to overturn precedents they view as incorrectly decided. Gorsuch often aligns with them on structural issues like limiting agency power, but breaks away on criminal justice and tribal sovereignty cases where his textualism leads him toward the liberal justices.
Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett form a more cautious center-right group. These three are most likely to join the liberal justices in close cases, and they tend to prefer narrow holdings that avoid sweeping doctrinal shifts when possible. Roberts and Kavanaugh in particular have shown a pattern of peeling off from the more aggressive conservatives in cases involving voting rights, election law, and certain civil liberties questions.
The practical effect is that the six can produce very different outcomes depending on the case. On administrative law and religious liberty, they’ve voted as a solid bloc. On criminal procedure, tribal rights, and some free speech questions, the splits are real and unpredictable. When the Court divides 5-4 with a conservative majority, it’s worth checking which conservative dissented, because the identity of the holdout often reveals more about the legal issue than the headline does.
The 2023 Code of Conduct
Until November 2023, the Supreme Court was the only federal court without a formal code of ethics. Lower court judges had been bound by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges for decades, while the justices operated under an informal understanding that they would voluntarily follow similar principles. The gap became a political flashpoint after reporting revealed undisclosed gifts and travel received by several justices.
The Court adopted its Code of Conduct for Justices on November 13, 2023. It requires justices to maintain the integrity and independence of the judiciary, avoid the appearance of impropriety, and refrain from letting outside relationships influence their official duties.17Supreme Court of the United States. Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States On recusal, the code states that a justice is presumed impartial and has an obligation to sit unless disqualification is warranted, for example when a reasonable person aware of all relevant circumstances would question the justice’s impartiality, or when the justice has a financial interest in the outcome. Critics have noted that the new code lacks an independent enforcement mechanism. Justices still decide for themselves whether to recuse, with no outside body reviewing those decisions.