Contemporary Supreme Court nomination hearings are always spectacles, but the one that began this week is exceptional. We face a confluence of events unique in our 229-year history: A president who is a named subject of a criminal investigation—and on whom the law may be closing in. And a nominee whose previous writings and commentary suggest he believes a sitting president is not subject to investigation or prosecution—views that in effect place the president above the law, although the nominee insists he doesn’t think anyone is beyond its reach.

The confirmation process itself has been rushed and thwarted by the majority, yielding a paltry fraction of the nominee’s White House records needed to evaluate him, with over 100,000 pages withheld based on sweeping and unsubstantiated “constitutional privilege” claims made late on the last business day before the hearing began. Then, over 40,000 of the nominee’s documents were released to the Senate with no real time for review on the evening before the hearing.

As important as the broken process is this stark fact: Never before has a president made a Supreme Court nomination with so many matters of deep personal importance to that president poised to come before the court. A president facing existential legal jeopardy cannot be permitted to pick his own justice to decide his case—especially a justice whose apparent views of presidential authority are expansive to say the least, who is deeply beholden to that president, and who seems likely to hold the decisive vote. As we explain in a new report out today, applying basic rule-of-law precepts and leading Supreme Court precedents to these unique circumstances identifies a specific range of matters from which the nominee must commit to recuse himself. The hearings must be paused to allow proper production and review of the documentary record followed by full consideration of the relevant facts and controlling law.

The constitutional principles mandating Kavanaugh’s recusal were given form in three recent Supreme Court decisions. The first, Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Company, Inc., concerned recusal obligations of a newly elected West Virginia state supreme court judge in an appeal of an award of damages against the company of a coal baron. The businessman had provided pivotal support to the judge’s campaign while the lawsuit was pending in a lower court. Emphasizing the “significant and disproportionate influence” of the coal baron in placing the judge on the court, the U.S. Supreme Court required recusal based on “serious risk of actual bias” that arises when “a man chooses the judge in his own cause.”