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Supreme Court justices finally find something to recuse over [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-05-20
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has been mired in scandals about the failure of justices to recuse themselves when their personal interests are at stake. Two major scandals—Justice Clarence Thomas’ penchant for letting billionaires pay his way, and Justice Samuel Alito’s wife being such a vexillologist she just can’t stop flying insurrection flags—did not spur either man to step back from cases where they seem to have a vested interest. Indeed, when people have called for the justices to recuse themselves in these circumstances, they’ve basically been told to pound sand.
But what if there was something important enough, big enough, that not only would Alito recuse himself but so would enough other justices that the court would no longer have a quorum to hear the case? Surely that would mean a new frontier in ethics!
So this did actually happen on Monday. Five justices recused themselves from hearing a copyright dispute over Ta-Nehisi Coates’ novel “The Water Dancer,” where the plaintiff alleged Coates had plagiarized him. Justices Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor all recused themselves. With five justices recusing, there’s no quorum, so the court can’t take up the case. That means the appellate court decision, which found no evidence of plagiarism and dismissed the case against Coates, stands.
There must be something very spicy going on for this plagiarism case to knock out over half the Court, right? Right?
Not really.
The Supreme Court, shown in November 2024
Though the justices are not required to explain their reasons for recusal, and none did so here, Barrett, Gorsuch, Jackson, and Sotomayor each have book deals through Penguin Random House, and Penguin’s parent company, Bertelsmann, is a party in the case. Alito didn’t have a book deal with Penguin—can you imagine reading an entire book by someone so eminently whiny and unlikeable?—but speculation is that he may have recused because he may have recently purchased stock in one of the parent companies involved in the lawsuit.
These recusals are not a bad thing. This is when the justices should recuse themselves from hearing a case, where they have a financial connection—even tangentially—to a party in the case. The Supreme Court’s code of conduct—which lacks an enforcement mechanism—says that justices should recuse themselves when they or someone in their household has “a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding.”
The justices did the right thing here, although this does raise the issue that perhaps public servants who are the last stop for legal disputes should not also have lucrative book deals.
None of this means you have to hand it to the Supreme Court, much less Alito. It’s a mystery why his conscience popped up here of all places, given his otherwise staunch refusal to ever be told what to do. In some ways, it’s more depressing to learn that there are times when Alito understands it would be unethical for him to hear a case, but that those times do not include things like “hearing a case about whether the insurrectionist president should get immunity given my family’s open enthusiasm for insurrection” or “hearing a case where an attorney for one of the parties interviewed me for The Wall Street Journal so I could complain about how ill-treated I am.”
The fact that individual justices voluntarily did the right thing here is great, but the Supreme Court needs an actual binding code of ethics that holds them to the same standards as other federal judges. Without that, we’re all just reliant on the whims of people like Alito, and no one should be subject to that.
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