The Conservative Justices Are Not Even Pretending to Care About What You Think

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes

During their summer vacations, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch did what all Supreme Court justices do every few years when the Court is in recess: go on tour to promote a book. Jackson recently published Lovely One, her entry into the canon of de rigueur Supreme Court memoirs. Gorsuch cranked out his version of this book in 2022, forcing him to come up with new material this time around: His latest, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, details his critique of the administrative state, which, in a fun coincidence, he has spent the last few years cheerfully gutting.

Supreme Court justices love writing books, and not only because of their excessive confidence that people are interested in what they have to say. Jackson’s deal for Lovely One is reportedly worth $3 million; for a forthcoming book on (I am not making this up) “how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule,” Amy Coney Barrett inked a deal worth $2 million. Although the justices, whose salaries are close to $300,000, must include book earnings in their financial disclosures, there is no cap on how much they can make. One of the privileges of ascending to the top of the federal judiciary is the right to pocket as much as a publisher will pay to print a glossy hardback with your face on the front.

I would not characterize as “ideal” a system in which public servants who take up a lucrative side hustle can outearn their salaries by an order of magnitude. At the same time, in recent Supreme Court scandal-adjusted terms, I do not find the judicial memoir industrial complex to be all that alarming; there are simply too many unreported luxury vacations and coup-curious flags flying over the justices’ homes to get all worked up about the occasional vanity book project. The more troubling takeaway from Jackson’s and Gorsuch’s respective summer schedules is what they reveal about the Court right now, as a six-justice Republican supermajority prepares for another term of rewriting American law as its members see fit.

To promote Lovely One, Jackson stuck with mainstream outlets—the kinds of places where a law student’s non-lawyer parents might learn about the book and buy them a copy as a Christmas gift. She appeared on The View, and CBS Mornings, and The Today Show. She went on NPR’s Fresh Air and PBS Newshour, and sat for interviews with The New York Times and The Washington Post. During an appearance on The Late Show, when Stephen Colbert asked, apropos of nothing, if she has a favorite novelty flag to display at her home, Jackson laughed and offered a polite “no comment.”

Gorsuch’s tour was different.