Last week it was announced that Samuel Alito signed a new book deal for an unreported sum with the Basic Liberty imprint of Basic Books, which is part of Hachette. This comes mere weeks after annual financial disclosures revealed that his colleagues—just about all of them—have been raking in the cash on their own book deals, adding zeroes at the end of their relatively modest annual salaries (if you think approximately $300,000 is modest) as Supreme Court justices.
I’ve written a lot about how sitting politicians shouldn’t be shilling books when they have a country to run, and if that’s true for the rest of the government it is doubly so for the Supreme Court. In fact, I believe they deserve their own column.
The highest court in the land is supposed to at least have the appearance of impartiality. Beginning in 1989, before we all knew that Clarence Thomas was zipping around on private jets to fancy vacations, the rule was that justices could not accept gifts, and they could only earn 15% additional income from teaching. The one exception: there are no limits to income from publishing books. In their 2023 self-imposed code of conduct the Court said it “encourages judges to stay connected to community activities and to engage with the public, including by writing on both legal and nonlegal subjects.” And so all nine justices have incentive to be prolific authors in addition to their official duties.
And prolific, they’ve been.
Sonya Sotomayor has now earned nearly $4 million from various book deals. In 2023 Ketanji Brown Jackson reported that she received a $2 million advance for her memoir, Lovely One, while Amy Coney Barrett earned a $2 million advance from Sentinel (an imprint of Penguin Random House) for her debut memoir coming this fall. Neil Gorsuch has earned $500,000 for his 2024 book from HarperCollins, and Brett Kavanaugh, the mention of whose name causes countless women to involuntarily shudder, has his own deal to publish with an imprint of Hachette.
I know there are bigger problems. I know it’s in the public interest to be able to engage with the justices’ stories if we so choose. But it’s difficult to watch the majority of the Court greenlight so much of Donald Trump’s agenda with so very little explanation while they’re simultaneously becoming millionaires via corporate book publishers. This isn’t just a partisan issue, however. In 2023 the AP reported that Justice Sotomayor had been relying on her staff, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, to help her promote her book (staffers in other government branches are prohibited from doing this, although that didn’t stop former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo from using his staff for book-related tasks in 2020 while he was still in office).
Such book-related recusals by Supreme Court members set off alarm bells in my head about who will get to determine the future of book publishing and books in general.
But let’s set aside the icky ethical concerns for a moment, and concentrate on what happens when judges are driven to both be more ethical and more active in the publishing industry than lots of regular full-time authors: Conflicts of interest abound.
The 2025 publishing copyright case of Baker v. Coates highlighted how ill-equipped the Court is to weigh in on an industry in which corporate consolidation has so drastically altered the landscape of where big names get published. Four justices—Barrett, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Jackson—had to recuse themselves because they’re Penguin Random House authors, and PRH’s parent company Bertelsmann was named in the case. Samuel Alito also recused himself and therefore the Court could not hear the case at all because it could not make quorum.
Such book-related recusals by Supreme Court members set off alarm bells in my head about who will get to determine the future of book publishing and books in general. In the coming years, as publishers do the important work of fighting book bans locally and nationally (with PRH leading the charge) and protecting their copyrights from being stolen by even larger corporations to train large language models, litigation involving book publishers is likely to become more common. Just this week a judge in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that authors and publishers are both eligible to receive proceeds from the Anthropic copyright piracy suit should the plaintiffs win.
If book ban and AI issues make it all the way to the Supreme Court I’m not at all confident that the Court will rule in a pleasing (to me) way, but at the very least these cases deserve to be heard.
A very easy solution to the problem of justices-as-authors not being able to weigh in publisher-related cases is that perhaps judges shouldn’t be allowed to write books until they retire. Former Justice Stephen Breyer published a book with Simon & Schuster last year, and I think that’s just fine (I won’t read it, but I’m glad it’s out there for all the Breyer-heads who want to). Having justices wait until retirement to launch their careers as authors would solve so many problems. Just think about how lovely it would have been to celebrate Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s remarkable career with the launch of her memoir upon her retirement in 2016.