The late Justice Antonin Scalia left a long legacy on the Supreme Court, from his dedication to originality to his sharp rhetoric.

But the avid hunter and fisherman also set a precedent of sorts for how to get free trips without revealing them, one that’s now causing headaches for some judges.

In 2004, Scalia flew with then Vice President Dick Cheney for a duck hunt at a private camp in Louisiana. A few weeks earlier, the judges had voted to hear the vice president’s appeal against a ruling requiring the disclosure of energy industry lobbyists who met with his energy policy task force.

When news of the trip was revealed, Scalia said his stay at the hunting camp involved personal hospitality unrelated to his court work.

And he said he didn’t have to waive the ruling in Cheney’s case.

“I don’t think my impartiality can be reasonably questioned,” he said at the time. He later joined a 7-2 ruling that barred Cheney from disclosing the participants of his energy task force.

On Tuesday, ProPublica revealed that Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2008 had taken a free and undisclosed private flight to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and stayed in a “luxury fishing cabin that charged more than $1,000 a day”.

Photos from the trip show Alito and Singer each posing proudly with a plump king salmon.

“Three years earlier,” the story said, “the same businessman flew with Judge Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay.”

When ProPublica reporters sent questions to Alito, he responded by sending the Wall Street Journal an op-ed that appeared late Tuesday refuting allegations that he took a free trip, paid for by a billionaire, with cases in court.

He described the King Salmon Lodge as a “comfortable but rustic facility”, and said he was unaware of Singer’s involvement in lawsuits.

Federal law requires the judges, like other federal employees, to disclose any significant gifts they have received. But Alito, like Judge Clarence Thomas and Scalia, said that because “personal hospitality” was exempt, the disclosure rule didn’t apply to private flights or stays at private resorts.

“When I got to court [in 2006] and until the recent amendment to the filing instructions, judges usually interpreted this discussion of ‘hospitality’ to mean that lodging and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts,” Alito wrote.

“The flight to Alaska was the only time I accepted transportation for a purely social event, following what I considered standard practice,” he wrote.

This loose interpretation of the gift disclosure rule did not apply to other judges or federal employees.

When ProPublica reported on Thomas’s many free and secret vacation trips with billionaire Harlan Crow, judges and others said they would have rejected such free travel or been required to disclose it.

Alito also followed Scalia’s lead in refusing to step aside in matters involving Singer’s hedge fund.

ProPublica cited a 2014 ruling when the court said in a 7-1 decision written by Scalia and accompanied by Alito that his hedge fund could pursue Argentina’s assets in the United States to settle a bankruptcy claim. It reported that the hedge fund ultimately received $2.4 billion.

Alito said he was unaware of Singer’s role in the case, adding that he barely knew Singer.

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e wrote in the Wall Street Journal piece

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it was incorrect to say “my failure to recant in these cases gave the appearance of impropriety…. I do not recall speaking to Mr. Singer on more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of short and casual comments on events attended by large groups. On no occasion did we discuss the activities of his companies.”