From The Wall Street Journal:
Penguin Random House on Monday said it is committed to publishing a coming book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett despite a dissenting online open letter that has garnered more than 600 signatures, including many from the publishing world.
The letter, which asks Penguin Random House to re-evaluate its decision to publish the book, argues that Justice Barrett’s vote in June in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade represented an attack on human rights, including the rights to “privacy, self determination, and bodily autonomy along with the federal right to an abortion in the United States.”
By Monday afternoon, the letter had attracted more than 625 signatures from authors, translators and agents. The signatories included more than 75 who identified themselves as Penguin Random House employees. The publisher employs approximately 11,000 globally, including more than 5,000 in the U.S., according to the company.
The book is being published by the Sentinel imprint of Bertelsmann SE’s Penguin Random House. “We remain fully committed to publishing authors who, like Justice Barrett, substantively shape today’s most important conversations,” said Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Sentinel, a leading conservative house, in the publisher’s first public comments on the situation.
Mr. Zackheim said Justice Barrett’s book is still being written and would likely be published in 2024. Although he declined to provide details about the work’s content, Politico in April 2021 described it as focused on why judges shouldn’t allow their decisions to be shaped by personal feelings.
A Penguin Random House spokeswoman said Mr. Zackheim was speaking on behalf of Penguin Random House U.S. On Monday, PEN America issued a statement rejecting calls to cancel the book. Penguin Random House is the world’s largest consumer book publisher.
Efforts to reach Justice Barrett were unsuccessful.
The dispute comes at a time of heightened political differences nationwide, creating division within the country’s largest publishers as employees have felt more emboldened to speak their minds on sensitive subjects. General-interest publishers such as Penguin Random House see it as their core mission to publish the ideas and opinions of a variety of leading political and intellectual leaders, arguing readers need to understand the views of those in power.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
UPDATE:
The Hill, a Washington newspaper had an article about Justice Barrett’s publishing contract. That article included the following:
(Justice Sonia) Sotomayor previously received a $1.175 million advance for her memoir published in 2013.
Justice Clarence Thomas has secured the highest book advance apart from Barrett’s, a sum of $1.5 million for his memoir published in 2007.
I ‘m less interested in Barrett’s political ideology than whether she has an interesting personal story and the literary gifts to express it effectively.
Is there an emoluments clause for your supreme court?
Interpreted strictly by the language, all Federal judges are “appointed officers” – the subject of the Emoluments Clause. However, interpretation has never been sought from SCOTUS, so who knows?
Besides that, the clause specifically bans titles/gifts from “King, Prince, or foreign State.” (Other than with permission from Congress, which is given for a very low limit through the Foreign Gifts Act.) While certainly owned by a foreign corporation (although still registered as a US LLC), Bertelsmann is certainly not one of those entities. I don’t think that it would be possible to “link through” and call a payment under a book contract something that would trigger a “foreign agent” definition, either.
Also, considering that most of the first several presidents were plantation owners who exported most of their crop to foreign countries and no one thought that such activity was covered under the emoluments clause, it is safe to say that Barrett’s book is not covered under it either.
See 353 books by Supreme Court Justices – https://www.scotusblog.com/2012/03/351-books-by-supreme-court-justices/
Excerpt:
In December 1833, the American Monthly Review commented on a newly published book by Joseph Story. By that time the fifty-four-year-old Supreme Court Justice had written or edited some twelve books. These works included a treatise on bills of exchange, a treatise on pleading, yet another on pleading and assumpsit, commentaries on the law of bailments, a biography, and even a book of poetry titled The Power of Solitude: A Poem in Two Parts. And he had a new work, a three-volume set with a long title: Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States; With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution. Of this book, the American Monthly reviewer wrote:
[T]he work is a rare union of patience, brilliancy, and acuteness, and . . . [contains] all the learning on the Constitution brought down to the latest period, so as to be invaluable to the lawyer, statesman, politician, and in fine, to every citizen who aims to have a knowledge of the great Charter under which he lives.
That review was among the first of many such laudatory reviews of a treatise that went on to become canonical in the history of American constitutional law. Before he died in 1845, Joseph Story published another twenty-one books after his Commentaries.
Story’s literary accomplishments notwithstanding, he was not the most prolific – that honor goes to Justice William O. Douglas. This son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, and former law professor and SEC chairman, wrote fifty-one books on a wide variety of topics ranging from foreign policy to psychiatry, from corporate reorganization to environmentalism, and from stare decisis to manifest destiny. If nothing else, Douglas was prolific. In 1958 alone, five works were published under his name, and then in 1960 and 1961 he published four different books for each of those respective years. And then there was Justice Joseph Story, who had thirty-three books under his byline, followed by William Howard Taft, the onetime President and later Chief Justice, who published some thirty-one books.