“Excuse” and “Accuse,” like “Recuse,” ARE transitive.

Would it make sense to say “The man excused,” or “the man accused?”

You seem to have some fantasy of a Platonic word cave in which the “true essence” of words can be found. Your entire argument is based on the premise that “recuse” is “transitive” in some essentially true way. This is silly. If we want to know how recuse should be used, we must look at how it is used.

As for your sarcastic argument that using “recuse” without an object is an instance of some more-abstract rule that “when the object is not stated, the object is the subject,” this, too, is just silly. Your “rule” is obviously not a rule, but no one said or implied that it was. You’ve simply picked an arbitrary level of abstraction to describe what’s happening with “recuse”; at a lower level of abstraction—that is, at the level of the word “recuse” itself—there’s no problem with the “rule” (which is really just a description of linguistic facts about how “recuse” is used) that “recuse” when used non-reflexively is implicitly reflexive.

This should prove my point (though I expect that you are too enamored of your Platonic word cave to agree):

(1) The man masturbated.
(2) The man masturbated his dog.

Both of these are standard English. Neither of them is ambiguous, and neither of them is an instance of some “new rule” in which an object, because unstated, is the subject. To the extent that there is a “rule” at work here, it is this:

When transitive verbs are used reflexively, the reflexive pronoun (the direct object) need not always be expressed. When the reflexive pronoun is omitted, the verb will be understood to be reflexive.

Examples abound:

(1) I washed. (Understood to mean “I washed myself.”)
(2) I washed my car.

Or:

(1) I shaved. (Understood to mean “I shaved myself.”)
(2) I shaved my cat.

Etc.

To say:

[The] court ruled that judges must remove from the cases . . . .

Means they must remove themselves.

In the long run, we’ll probably save a sheet of paper per year.

[The] ruling on conflicts of interest among elected judges could prompt a deluge of requests for judges to recuse themselves from cases.

[The] court ruled that judges must remove themselves from cases that involve . . . .

The court . . . ruled that the Constitution requires judges to disqualify themselves from hearing a case . . .

So . . . what happens when we just start converting transitive verbs into intransitive verbs to avoid sexism (as the speculation goes)?

So to Thorne’s statement, “Like ‘accuse’ and ‘excuse,’ ‘recuse’ needs an object, else we don’t know who was recused,” we can answer: Are you kidding? We absolutely know — if we speak English — that when we read “The judge recused,” we know that the judge himself was recused. You would have to be entirely ignorant of how the word “recuse” is used to wonder whether “The judge recused” could mean that the judge recused anyone else.

Finally, in his dissent in Caperton, Justice Scalia asks: “In the best of all possible worlds, should judges sometimes recuse even where the clear commands of our prior due process law do not require it?”

Lexicography is an empirical science, not a theoretical one, and this is pretty good evidence that “recuse” does not need an explicit direct object.

A dictionary in my office (Webster’s New College Dictionary (Wiley Publishing Inc. 2007)) lists “recuse” as both transitive and intransitive.* Also OED online lists “recuse” as transitive and (in North America and South Africa) reflexive and occasionally intransitive. At home, I have an Oxford American dictionary; it’ll be interesting to see what that says.

* I realize that not all “Webster’s” are Merriam-Websters. But this one seems to have a solid group of editors.