Ta-Nehisi Coates and Oprah Winfrey are celebrating a court victory delivered through an unprecedented move by the US Supreme Court. The court had been set to hear a copyright dispute involving claims that Coates' The Water Dancer, an Oprah's Book Club selection, plagiarized from Ralph W. Baker, Jr.'s Shock Exchange, reports Forbes. But five of the court's nine justices—Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor—recused themselves from the case. All but Alito have published books through Penguin Random House, whose parent company was named as a party in the case.
It's unclear why Alito recused himself, though judicial ethics watchdog Fix the Court speculates that he may have stock in another named company, perhaps Apple, Disney, or Amazon. The four remaining justices determined the case "cannot be heard" because a six-judge quorum had not been met, per the Washington Post. As a result, "the court is required by statute to affirm the judgment of the lower court," per Bloomberg Law. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a district court's dismissal of the case, finding "little overlap" in the work of Baker and Coates "beyond relating to Black history and culture."
This marks only the third time justices have recused themselves from cases since the court adopted a new code of ethics in November 2023. That is no enforcement mechanism for the code, so "for the code to work, the justices would have to do things they wouldn't normally have, and that appears to be the case here," Fix the Court executive director Gabe Roth tells the Post. The watchdog, which previously complained about justices hearing cases related to Penguin, noted it would be improper for justices to oversee cases involving companies "that pay them thousands if not millions of dollars nearly every year in advances, royalties or both." (More Supreme Court stories.)
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