FIVE members of SCOTUS recused themselves from Ta-Nehisi Coates's case. 4 of them have book deals with a publisher involved. And Alito might own a related stock.

The Supreme Court said Monday it would not take up the case Ralph W. Baker, Jr. v. Ta-Nehisi Coates et al, a copyright dispute in which Baker alleged Coates’ book “The Water Dancer” plagiarized Baker’s book “Shock Exchange: How Inner-City Kids From Brooklyn Predicted the Great Recession and the Pain Ahead.”
[...]
The justices did not give a reason for why they were recusing and the court has not responded to a request for comment, but Barrett, Gorsuch, Jackson and Sotomayor all published books through Penguin Random House, whose parent company Bertelsmann was named as a party in the case.
It’s unclear why Alito recused himself from the case, though judicial ethics watchdog Fix the Court speculates it’s possible he could have purchased stock in one of the other parties named in the case, such as Apple, Warner Bros. or Disney, or Amazon, which owns MGM Studios, a party in the suit.

A Bluesky thread...

Ketanji Brown Jackson "signed a book deal, reportedly worth $3 million, in 2022 after she joined the Court. Penguin Random House will publish her memoir."
Amy Coney Barrett "reportedly signed a $2 million book deal with Penguin Random House in 2021"
Neil Gorsuch: "Penguin Random House, which published a book that consisted of his writings and speeches with a splash of memoir thrown in, paid him $650,000 from 2018 to 2020. The next year, he signed another deal with HarperCollins for $250,000."
Sonia Sotomayor: $3.8 million in book deals since joining the court
https://subium.com/profile/zacheverson.com/post/3lpkvppkzms2y

There are source links at the thread if you're interested.

18 comments

Here’s an incredibly cold take: If the Supreme Court is going to exist, Supreme Court justices get to own nothing for the rest of their days. Like, you basically become a ward of the state.
We’ll help you find a house, give you a reasonable salary to live a nice life, and you should be scared that if you accidentally accept a coffee from a close friend you might get into serious trouble because of if.
- The Supreme Court justices should all have to share an apartment and ride a 9 person tandem bike to the Court building.
  
  One big robe, too.

pack the court. into a phone booth. and then lock it. and then throw it in the ocean
- chained to a sinking anchor

Supreme loophole
Shouldn't these types of extra curricular income methods be ... illegal? Just seems like a form of bribery with extra steps.
- I think you'll find America doesn't have bribery or corruption
  
  The law says you can do that stuff so it's fine.

considering those books will sell like 2000 copies, how is this anything other than corruption
- And there's something immensely sad to me how doofuses who work for places such as the NYT read such books and write about them. Doofuses pretend - or actually believe - they gained "insights". "Auto-hagiography" is anything but enlightening. And I wonder how often the books are actually by the person with their name on it. It's ez money either way. Why not skip of highly time-consuming effort of thinking and writing and use a ghostwriter.
  
  Even worse (but funnier), said doofuses are rapidly being replaced with AI on both ends of the slop pipe, so it will soon be, if it's not already, AI models spitting out reviews for books written by AI models.
  Imagine, an entire industry worth millions (billions?) of dollars in political bribes being laundered behind a thin facade of AI slop regurgitating itself over and over

Wait... now some Supremes decide theres a conflict of interest such that they'd need to recuse themselves?

Baker loses his appeal, which frankly is the right call and idk why it got to the point of SC members recusing themselves in the first place. Baker's claim of plagiarism was extremely flimsy, I read some of the supposedly plagiarized passages and they have literally nothing in common except being written in a conversational style.
This all reads like a publicity plot to me. The SC wants to do something that makes them look ethical and principled to counter all of the recent news about their blatant corruption, so they pick this case where they were absolutely not going to reverse the lower court's decision in order to do it. Really they should have just indicated from the jump that they had no interest in taking the case.
- All the SC justices are getting free book publicity from this too

18 comments