The Supreme Court Justices Are Just Like Anyone Else

Updated at 3:16 p.m. ET on September 7, 2023

What do some Supreme Court justices and physicians have in common? Both take gifts from those who stand to profit from their decisions, and both mistakenly think they can’t be swayed by those gifts.

Gifts are not only tokens of regard; they are the grease and the glue that help maintain a relationship. That’s not always unhealthy, but it’s important to note that gifts create obligation. The indebtedness of the recipient to the giver is a social norm in all cultures, and a basic principle of human interaction—something the French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote about in his classic essay The Gift.

[Read: Gift-giving is about the buyer, not the receiver]

This sense of reciprocity is subconscious and powerful, and doesn’t necessarily require a . In other words, a material gift need not be reciprocated as a material gift,