Justice Alito Taught Law With a Man Who Tried to Overturn the Election

On the evening of January 6, 2021, retired North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin had a nine-minute conversation with former President Donald Trump. This call followed weeks of efforts by Martin to find any legal means to keep Trump in power, during which he peddled fringe theories of election fraud and constitutional law to state officials and the Supreme Court.

Just 20 days after the insurrection, Martin had another intimate audience with another powerful right-winger: He taught a three-day seminar on constitutional law with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for Regent University Law School in Virginia, where Martin was the dean at the time. 

This link between a Supreme Court justice and such a close legal adviser to Trump’s Big Lie efforts has not been reported previously, and it adds to mounting questions about Alito’s sympathy for Trump heading into the election. 

Despite evidence at the time that Martin was part of the Trump campaign’s legal brain trust and fed Trump radical ideas about the Constitution, Alito taught the three-day seminar with him again in 2022.

Martin and Alito did not respond to The Intercept’s questions for this story. 

“It was and continues to be a shock to the system knowing that the upper echelons of the legal community used their legal talents to subvert the will of the people,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, “and that Supreme Court justices of all people are friends with these individuals.”  

Martin’s continued access to Alito even after January 6 also illustrates just how little scrutiny Martin ever faced. While other prominent Trump legal advisers like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani have faced sanctions for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Martin has never publicly accounted for his role. He’s still a law school dean, now at High Point University, a private university in North Carolina, which also did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about Martin’s relationship with Alito. 

Martin remains active in prestigious legal organizations, including the American Law Institute and American Bar Association committees, where he recently sat on a judicial ethics panel and moderated another about election law. He was at the Republican National Convention in July, and a far-right group recently floated Martin as a potential Supreme Court nominee. 

Crossing Paths

In 2019, after more than 20 years on the North Carolina Supreme Court and four as its chief justice, Martin stepped down and moved into legal education. He took over as dean of Regent Law, which is part of the Christian university founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. In a blog post announcing a new constitutional law center — named after Robertson — Martin wrote that its purpose was to promote originalism and other “first principles in constitutional law,” while “educating and cultivating the next generation of Christian lawyers.”

During Martin’s first year, Regent added Alito as a “Senior Lecturing Fellow,” along with 11 other prominent conservatives such as Ken Starr. Some of these new Regent lecturers had clear connections to Martin, including two fellow retired North Carolina judges and the general counsel of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, who clerked for Martin after law school. 

Arch-conservative Alito was a natural fit to teach at Regent, where another Trump attorney, Jay Sekulow, was already on the faculty.  

In the years before starting at Regent, Alito wrote decisions that chipped away at the Obamacare contraception mandate and weakened public-sector unions. During the Trump administration, Alito joined decisions that favored presidential authority, like the 5-4 ruling affirming the “Muslim ban” despite Trump’s many statements about its discriminatory aims.

More recently, Alito faced calls to recuse from cases related to the January 6 insurrection after it came out that an upside-down American flag — a common “Stop the Steal” symbol — was flying outside his house in January 2021. Alito declined to recuse, largely blaming his wife and a dispute with neighbors for the flag incident. “My wife is fond of flying flags,” he wrote in May 2024 to members of Congress. “I am not.”

Alito also had some history with Regent Law, where he keynoted the school’s 25th anniversary banquet in 2011. But he and Martin had few clear ties before teaching together, beside an advisory board they joined together at Duke Law School in January 2019. 

By his own account, teaching with Alito is one of the pinnacles of Martin’s career. 

Asked recently about the biggest challenges and rewards in moving from the judiciary into legal education, Martin highlighted that he “even was able to co-teach a law course with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito for three years in a row.” (In the same softball interview, Martin dodged questions about January 6, citing “confidentiality.”)

Martin’s online biography for the Federalist Society lists his seminars with Alito among many other achievements and honors. Martin recently added the Alito seminars to his bio on the High Point University website, where he has been law school dean since leaving Regent in 2022. 

Alito and Martin taught the first iteration of their joint seminar — titled “Select Issues in Constitutional Interpretation” — in January 2020 in Washington, D.C. In a photo released by Regent, Alito and Martin stand side by side in a room at the National Center for State Courts.  

The Regent law students huddled around Alito and Martin had to apply to take the course, according to the course schedule.

Nathan Hernandez, a Regent Law alum who was in the 2020 seminar, told The Intercept it was like many law school courses: a long reading list and Socratic questioning. He said Alito and Martin split the teaching along their respective judicial careers, with Alito focusing on the U.S. Constitution and Martin on state constitutional issues.  

Another former Regent student selected for the 2020 seminar, Ryan Heath, who includes it in his online bio, was more effusive.  

“It was a huge blessing to have that opportunity to learn from Justice Alito,” said Heath, who describes himself as “a constitutional expert and talented legal strategist.”  

Since graduating with a Regent degree, Heath founded an “anti-woke” nonprofit to fight mask mandates and other Covid restrictions through what his website calls “Rosa Parks style civil disobedience.” He’s also filed and lost multiple lawsuits to overturn election results in Arizona. 

Earlier this year, Heath was sanctioned by one judge for filing “groundless” litigation that sought to decertify certain elections in 2022. Heath and his clients are appealing that ruling, which ordered them to pay more than $200,000 in fees. 

“I use what I learned every day,” Heath told The Intercept, explaining that the seminar with Alito and Martin improved his constitutional arguments.

Martin’s Busy Year

In between their first and second seminars, Alito and Martin both had packed schedules. In the summer of 2020, Alito dissented loudly against the court’s ruling that it was illegal for employers to discriminate against gay and trans workers. Days after the election, he gave a politically tinged speech to the Federalist Society bemoaning that “the tolerance for opposing views is now in very short supply in many law schools.”

Martin was particularly busy between Trump’s defeat in November 2020 and the insurrection on January 6, The Intercept found. 

Records from the January 6 committee and other sources show Martin helped float a radical theory: that state legislatures had “plenary,” or absolute, authority over the selection of presidential electors, regardless of what their respective state laws or courts might say. This theory is often credited to Eastman. But records show Martin spread it to an influential state legislator, Mark Finchem of Arizona, who is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona “fake electors” case and who repeatedly based his own actions on his “plenary” authority as a state legislator.

Martin helped pitch a lawsuit grounded in the plenary theory to the Supreme Court, which one of the attorneys involved called Martin’s “brainchild.” In coordination with the Trump campaign, Martin and other attorneys recruited Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to file the lawsuit directly to the Supreme Court in early December 2020, in a case called Texas v. Pennsylvania.  

The Supreme Court quickly dismissed Paxton’s challenge for lack of standing. And last year, by a 6-3 margin, the Supreme Court rejected an even milder version of the “plenary” theory. (Alito dissented on the grounds that the court should not have ruled on the case at all.)

Paxton, Eastman, and other Trump-aligned attorneys are currently fighting disciplinary charges over unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in their briefs in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case. No misconduct charges have ever been lodged against Martin, however, who had a central role in orchestrating the case but never signed any of the filings and thus is not subject to ethics rules governing lawyers’ conduct in judicial proceedings. 

The Intercept found that Trump so valued Martin’s views that other advisers invoked Martin to boost their own pitches. Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, another North Carolinian who reportedly introduced Martin into Trump’s circle of advisers, tried to pressure the Justice Department to file another baseless lawsuit to the Supreme Court modeled on the failed Texas case. In doing so, they pointed to Martin’s endorsement of the strategy, according to testimony from two DOJ officials to the January 6 committee. 

Days after the insurrection, more than 150 law school deans signed a statement criticizing “some lawyers” — whom the statement did not name — who “challenged the outcome of the election with claims that they did not support with facts or evidence.”

“This betrayed the values of our profession,” read the deans’ statement, which Martin and Regent Law did not sign.

Alito and Martin, Back in Class

By the time their second seminar started on January 26, 2021 — after the infamous upside-down flag was spotted flying outside Alito’s home — the first details about Martin’s contributions to the Big Lie effort were just starting to trickle out. 

A few days after the Capitol attack, the New York Times reported that, in the days leading up to the insurrection, Trump told Mike Pence that, in Martin’s view, the vice president had the constitutional authority to derail the election count. The Times did not cite its source for that claim, which the January 6 committee credited in its final report. Even many of Trump’s other legal advisers rejected this fringe theory. 

Martin has repeatedly declined to say what he and Trump discussed over the phone on January 6, citing “confidentiality” despite also claiming Trump and his campaign never retained him as an attorney.

Regent’s press release about the 2021 seminar does not mention Martin. But a spokesperson for Regent confirmed that Alito and Martin taught the seminar together, with Alito teaching remotely from D.C., and Martin and the students at Regent’s campus in Virginia Beach. Regent did not respond to questions about why this press release omitted Martin’s role in the seminar, when the prior year’s announcement featured him prominently.

Alito likely did not violate any formal ethical rules by teaching with Martin, Fix the Court’s Roth said, since these “do not cover every possible ethical quandary and could not have foreseen a situation where some leading members of the bar tried to topple our democracy.” 

“Justice Alito co-teaching with an election denier doesn’t pass” the smell test.

“But to me, there’s also the smell test,” Roth said. “Justice Alito co-teaching with an election denier doesn’t pass it, and I hope the justice is more thoughtful about who he shares a lectern with in the future.”

Shortly after the 2021 seminar, another detail about Martin’s involvement in the Big Lie came out: The New York Times reported that he was part of the group that developed the ludicrous Supreme Court briefs that Paxton filed weeks earlier. A small flurry of press coverage focused on Martin, including pointed editorials in North Carolina outlets, but both Martin and Regent refused to answer questions.

A year later, after more reports came out about Martin’s role, he and Alito taught their three-day seminar again. Martin and his students traveled down to Washington, D.C., according to a Regent spokesperson, where the class was again held at the National Center for State Courts.

But Regent’s press release about the January 2022 seminar does not mention Martin, and he does not appear in a photo published online.

Justice Samuel Alito, in the red tie, with Regent Law students for a 2022 seminar in Washington, D.C. Not pictured: Mark Martin. Photo: Regent University

In early June 2022, a month after commencement — at which the program boasted both Alito and Martin among the “Christian scholars, political figures, and international heads of state” in residence — Regent announced that Martin was leaving. 

The next day, High Point University announced that Martin was returning to North Carolina to be the founding dean of its new law school. The American Law Institute, one of the country’s most influential legal organizations and which first elected Martin to membership in 2009, issued its own press release about Martin’s move to High Point. Berkeley Law School’s dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, who had signed the law school deans’ statement after January 6, gave Martin a glowing blurb in his capacity as president of the American Association of Law Schools.   

Martin’s appointment at High Point kicked off another media cycle about unanswered questions surrounding his role advising Trump after the 2020 election. Progressives in North Carolina mounted a brief campaign opposing Martin’s appointment, which featured a billboard that blared “MARK MARTIN BETRAYED OUR CONSTITUTION.”

Like Regent, High Point has consistently deflected questions about Martin’s role advising Trump after the 2020 election. 

“Chief Justice Martin assured HPU that he never has, nor ever will, support a betrayal of the Constitution or an insurrection of any kind,” a university spokesperson said in a statement responding to The Intercept’s findings. This was identical to a statement High Point gave last year after the January 6 committee issued its final report, which mentions Martin only briefly. 

A few months after Martin moved to High Point, Alito’s bio disappeared from the Regent website. According to Alito’s financial disclosures, the school paid Alito $9,000 each year to teach the seminar with Martin. 

More than three years after January 6, Martin plays a prominent role in the legal community, both nationally and in North Carolina. 

He has appeared on the cover of legal magazines and written for an American Bar Association newsletter for judges. In the past year, the ABA hosted him as a panelist on judicial ethics and asked him to moderate a panel about the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected his unhinged “plenary” theory of state legislatures’ power. Martin’s role promoting that theory after the 2020 election didn’t come up.     

Alito, meanwhile, has continued to lurch rightward.

In summer 2022, months after his final seminar with Martin, he wrote the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. This year, after the flags scandal broke and Alito refused to recuse himself from cases related to January 6, he joined the conservative majority in handing Trump extraordinary immunity for his own role in the insurrection. 

As November approaches, it looks likely that the Supreme Court will play a significant role in deciding whether Trump returns to the White House. And out of nine people on the country’s highest bench, one of them decided to teach alongside a lawyer who helped orchestrate the Big Lie’s legal strategy. 

The post Justice Alito Taught Law With a Man Who Tried to Overturn the Election appeared first on The Intercept.