The Supreme Court on Oct. 19 affirmed a lower-court judgment in a copyright petition after four justices recused themselves because of financial ties involving their book publisher. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson took no part in the case, leaving the court without the quorum required to hear it.
The case was brought by BMG Rights Management and others against Cyril E. The petition followed a Fifth Circuit decision issued Jan. 12, 2026, and was formally docketed at the Supreme Court on June 16. The parties completed briefing by late September, and the petition was distributed for the justices’ Oct. 16 conference.
The recusals were tied to Penguin Random House, the publisher of books by the four justices, and Bertelsmann, the company that owns both Penguin Random House and BMG. The court’s docket says that because it lacked a quorum and the qualified justices concluded the case could not be heard at the next term, the lower-court judgment was affirmed under federal law. That disposition has the same effect as an affirmance by an equally divided court, but it does not produce a Supreme Court opinion resolving the copyright questions.
Its Code of Conduct says a justice has an obligation to sit unless disqualified, but should step aside when an unbiased and reasonable person could question the justice’s impartiality. The code also permits justices to write and publish books, while warning that outside activities should not interfere with official duties, impair impartiality or lead to frequent recusals.
The code recognizes that recusals can affect the Supreme Court differently from lower courts because another judge cannot simply be substituted for a justice. It also says individual justices, rather than the court as a whole, decide recusal questions. In this case, the result was a final disposition without review by a full court and without an explanation of the underlying copyright dispute.
The four recusals have prompted calls to reconsider how justice-authors handle income from publishers that may later appear before the court. One proposed approach is placing book earnings in accounts that the justices cannot access until they leave the bench, which could reduce the need for future recusals.