(Originally posted 9/4/25 and updated to reflect new events and information)

Fix the Court analyzed the data from four justices’ ongoing, about-to-begin or recently ended book tours. The result? They’re more partisan than we’d like them to be.

Standing next to Mitch McConnell at the McConnell Center in 2021, Justice Amy Coney Barrett told the audience, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

But four years later, you might get the opposite impression when examining several justices’ recent and forthcoming book events. The four of them are too often agreeing to, or actively seeking out, speaking engagements that reflect their prior partisan leanings.

Fix the Court scored the tours and rated them: Justice Gorsuch’s Over Ruled tour was that of a partisan hack (1C), Justice Jackson’s Lovely One tour falls between partisan hack and lean partisan (0.73L), and Justice Barrett’s planned Listening to the Law tour and Justice Sotomayor’s planned Just Shine tour lean partisan (0.52C and 0.52L, respectively).

“Publishers that are doling out six- or seven-figure advances to the justices have significant pressure to sell as many of their books as possible, so at first glance, a tour that hews to a justice’s partisan priors might seem understandable,” FTC’s Gabe Roth said. “But in reality, the justices are nine of the most powerful people in the world, and they could easily sell out, and sell lots of books from, any room they choose to appear in. They all signed on to the ethics code, and that means they should be doing more to seek out partisan balance when they’re on the road or sitting for an interview.”

Assigning scores:
To score the tours, we first compiled a list of the justices’ events and interviews — more than 100 in all. (An event counted as a “book event” if the work was featured in some way — e.g., copies for sale, displayed on stage or in the event’s marketing materials; we also included and rated the placement of book excerpts.) Next, we gave each venue and/or each moderator/interviewer a partisanship score between 1L and 1C, where 1L or 0.75L indicates a venue or person who is obviously, or within 30 seconds of online searching, respectively, associated with liberals, like a podcast host who ran for office as a Democrat, and 1C or 0.75C indicates an obvious or quick-search association with conservatives, like a Wall Street Journal ed board member.

Fractions of points were awarded to interviewers with moderate or heterodox views (e.g., David Rubenstein, who worked for President Carter but is friendly with conservative justices, was rated 0.25L; Alyssa Farah, a conservative who didn’t vote for Trump, was rated 0.75C); where a venue or outlet aims for neutrality but often demonstrates biases (e.g., some venues and outlets were rated 0.25L, 0.5L or 0.75L); or where an event moderator is a presidential appointee (federal judges were rated 0.25L or 0.25C as a shorthand since we’re not in the business of rating their opinions). For events with multiple interviewers or moderators, we averaged the scores.

Scoring the tours:
We then added the venue scores and the interviewer scores and divided by the number of events. A perfectly liberal tour would score a 2L and a perfectly conservative tour would score a 2C. A score of zero, on the other hand, would demonstrate compliance with §4(A)(1)(e) of the justices’ Code of Conduct, which states, “In deciding whether to speak or appear before any group, a Justice should consider whether doing so would create an appearance of impropriety in the minds of reasonable members of the public.” Here’s how the scores were categorized, with the justices’ scores below that:Gorsuch:
Score: 1C over 17 events and appearances. Rating: Partisan hack. Reason: Heavy reliance on conservative audiences and news outlets. Of the 12 book-related interviews he gave in 2024, seven were with conservative outlets, and in three of the remaining five, he spoke to a conservative interviewer. And he only spoke at GOP presidential libraries.

Jackson:
Score: 0.73L over 67 events and appearances. Rating: Between lean partisan and partisan hack. Reason: Most of Jackson’s interviewers and moderators have been Black thought leaders, who in today’s America tend to be liberal. So there should be some tempering of concern there. That said, and unlike Barrett’s or Gorsuch’s tours, which had some L-ratings mixed in, none of Jackson’s venues or moderators earned a C-rating, which we hope changes, since her tour appears to be far from over.

Barrett:
Score: 0.52C over 13 events and appearances. Rating: Lean partisan. Reason: Not a bad start, and with the tour still developing, there’s hope she’ll veer further toward the middle. A stop at the LBJ Library after visiting Nixon’s and Reagan’s Libraries was a balancing move that dropped the partisanship score. Still, many of her interviewers are well-known conservatives (Weiss, Hewitt and Ryan) or self-styled originalists (Bumatay and Munoz).

Sotomayor:
Score: 0.52L over 12 events and appearances. Rating: Lean partisan. Reason: This tour, which is still adding dates, is for a children’s book, so the venues are mainly libraries and other places that families tend to gather. While some such locales are partisan (through featured speakers, book-of-the-month selections and more), many aim for neutrality.

The elephants and the donkeys in the room:
One caveat deserves a second mention: that it’s possible, if not likely, that some partisan appearances are self-fulfilling. A conservative audience is more likely to want to hear from Gorsuch (and buy his book), just as a liberal audience is more likely to want to hear from Jackson. Fox News or NPR, respectively, might thus become publishers’ or chambers’ top targets for an interview — especially considering how much money the publishers have spent to purchase these books from the justices.

But once you peel this onion, this excuse becomes unconvincing. These are four of the most powerful people in the world. Without much trouble, they could have sought out dozens of politically neutral venues or news outlets where they could share their stories and hawk their books.

This week, for example, we learned that Barrett turned down an interview with CNN and canceled an interview with the New York Times, and we are aware of other times a justice declined an interview with a news outlet that would have moved their partisanship scores, even ever-so-slightly, closer to zero.

Alternatively, the justices could have pursued balance: for every Fox appearance Gorsuch did, he could have sat for an NPR interview. For every stop at the Nixon and Reagan Libraries that he did, he could have stopped at the Johnson (as Barrett will do) and Clinton Libraries. The same logic applies for Jackson or Sotomayor in the other direction.

Additional information:
The amount of money each justice has earned for the books noted above is as follows (total amount of book earnings listed here):
— Gorsuch, $500,000 (likely the full advance)
— Jackson, $2,962,500 of a reported $3 million advance (like larger than $3 million given the agent’s cut)
— Barrett, $425,000 of a reported $2 million advance
— Sotomayor, $60,000 (likely the full advance, but we’ll know more next year)

For events in which the justices appeared with their co-author or illustrator, that person wasn’t included in the ratings. Likewise, events during the book tours that were unrelated to the books (e.g., Constitution Day lectures a justice would have delivered anyway) are excluded from the dataset.