Hundreds join petition to cancel Amy Coney Barrett's $2M book deal with Penguin Random House
A petition opposing Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's forthcoming book had been signed by hundreds of "members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community" as of Oct 27. The book is about how judges deal with their emotions during court proceedings.
Signers of the petition on behalf of the "literary community" include editors, authors, and publishers of Penguin Random House, which signed a $2 million book deal with Barret in 2021 Just before the presidential election, Barrett, 49, won Senate approval to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. According to the petitioners, Barrett's stance on the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v Wade violated parent company Bertelsmann's code of conduct. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes the right to abortion, is followed and supported by this ruling. "This is not just a book that we disagree with, and we are not calling for censorship," the petition states. "Many of us work daily with books we find disagreeable to our personal politics. Rather, this is a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits."
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The central idea of Barrett's book is the discussion that judges should not let their emotions influence their judgments. The petition asserts that this assumption conflicts with Barrett's decision that Roe v Wade should be overturned. "Yet it seems this is exactly what Coney Barrett has done, inflicting her own religious and moral agenda upon all Americans while appropriating the rhetoric of even-handedness - and Penguin Random House has agreed to pay her a sum of $2 million to do it," it says. The petition rejects Barrett's rhetoric, but also points out that "it is imperative that publishers uphold their dedication to freedom of speech with a duty of care." "We recognize that harm is done to a democracy not only in the form of censorship but also in the form of assault on inalienable human rights," it continues.
Justices Stephen Breyer and Neil Gorsuch have also published books on legal and political topics, making Barrett not the only Supreme Court justice to have done so. While Justice Sonia Sotomayor received $1.175 million for her memoir, Justice Clarence Thomas got $1.5 million for his. Charles Geyh, a professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law who specializes in judicial ethics, told Bloomberg that while federal law does not prohibit judges from receiving money for writing books, such a large advance raises appearance concerns. "Justice Barrett may be confident that the book project will not detract from her focus on her judicial duties, and she may well be right," Geyh said. "But from the perspective of the average American who is grinding out a living at 40K a year, the optics of a judge - who is paid $250,000 in tax dollars to do the people's business as a justice -- moonlighting for $2 million on a book deal, are problematic."
Stephen Gillers, an expert in judicial ethics from the New York University Law School, said he doesn't see anything wrong with the agreement. “The fact of the deal and the amount of the advance by themselves raise no judicial ethics problem, although she will have to recuse herself in cases in which the publisher is a party,” he said according to Daily Mail.
