The Attacks on Justice Sonia Sotomayor – by William Otis
As noted in my last entry, the liberal press (meaning essentially all of it) is in full throat against Justice Clarence Thomas. The complaint in essence is that Thomas (and his wife as well) accepted expensive gifts, travel and vacations from a wealthy Republican donor, Harlan Crow, and the Justice failed to report it on his financial disclosure forms. The outraged if implicit suggestion is that Thomas is corrupt a suggestion oddly unaccompanied by even the allegation that Thomas voted on cases in which Crow had a stake. So far as I have been able to discover, he never did.
It was not a coincidence, then, that this New York Post story caught my eye, Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn t recuse herself from cases involving publisher that paid her $3M: report.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn t recuse herself from multiple cases involving a book publisher Penguin Random House which paid her more than $3 million since 2010, according to a report.
The copyright infringement cases, in which Penguin Random House stood to suffer financial damage if the court ruled unfavorably, were not taken up by the high court but justices voted on whether or not to hear the cases.
Altogether, Sotomayor earned $3.6 million from Penguin Random House and its subsidiaries for agreeing to let them publish her 2013 memoir, My Beloved World, and numerous children s books since then, the Daily Wire reported on Thursday.
The same year that her memoir came out, Sotomayor voted on whether the high court should take up Aaron Greenspan v. Random House.
Her liberal colleague at the time, Justice Stephen Breyer, recused himself from the case, having also received money from Penguin Random House.
Does this mean that Justice Sotomayor sold out? No. That she s a crook? No. That Random House is actually her sugar daddy? No. It doesn t mean any of that, which is all just a smear job.
Does it mean that she might have been better advised to step away from cases involving that publisher, or to have established a blind trust or something similar? Possibly. Evidently Justice Breyer thought so.