JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Something unusual happened at the Supreme Court this week. So many justices stepped aside from a case about music copyrights that the court could not hear it. NPR Supreme Court correspondent Carrie Johnson reports.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Major publishing companies and lobbying groups for movies and the recording industry all lined up this summer to ask the Supreme Court to accept a case about who owns foreign copyrights. Josh Blackman's a law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. He describes what happened next.
JOSH BLACKMAN: All this work was done. Probably hundreds of lawyers participate in this matter. They all strategically said, let's bring the case to the court now. And then what happened? There's no quorum.
JOHNSON: No quorum because 4 of the 9 justices recused themselves. The court did not explain why Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson stepped away from the case. But the watchdog group Fix the Court has an idea. All four of those justices have book deals with Penguin Random House, part of a German conglomerate that's a party in the music copyright case. Gabe Roth leads Fix the Court.
GABE ROTH: And when you have a financial stake in a party or your finances could somehow be impacted by the outcome of a case, under federal law and the Supreme Court's code of conduct, the justices are supposed to recuse.
JOHNSON: Roth and other experts say this is a good news, bad news situation. It's a good thing the justices follow the recusal rules, they say. Renee Knake Jefferson is a legal ethics expert at the University of Houston.
RENEE KNAKE JEFFERSON: But when four justices need to step aside, the Supreme Court can no longer decide the case, and that becomes an institutional problem, not just an individual ethics issue.
JOHNSON: This problem is acute at the nation's highest court, she says, because...
JEFFERSON: There's no other justices who can step in and substitute for them.
JOHNSON: She says the justices who want to write books could put money from their advances and royalties in separate accounts that they couldn't touch until retirement. The court had no comment on that proposal. Three years ago, the Supreme Court published a code of conduct, but the long and short of it is the justices largely police themselves. Law professor Josh Blackman says Congress should pass legislation to address the book royalties issue.
BLACKMAN: I think we need to have the justices focus on their day job more. Grant more cases, decide more opinions, write more. You know, the books are fun, but that's not why they're there.
JOHNSON: Tim Kappel's a lawyer for the songwriter in the case the court declined to hear. He says the recusal speaks to the broad impact of copyright law and the expansive definition of all artists, including the ones who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Carrie Johnson, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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