“It was around the time the justices crossed the $10 million threshold in book earnings that I started to change my mind about the whole enterprise.”

So begins an op-ed by FTC’s Gabe Roth in SCOTUSblog today, discussing why the justices’ practice of writing and promoting books deserves greater scrutiny, which advocates have primarily reserved for travel and gifts.

The piece describes all the ways the justices can add to their roughly $300,000 annual salaries, from teaching to investments and real estate, with multimillion book deals standing above all else.

As it stands today, the seven book-writing justices (all but Roberts and Kagan) have collectively earned more than $13 million from their books.

Roth’s solution: requiring the justices to place their book earnings in an account they can’t touch until they retire.

Beyond avoiding the corrupting influence of money, there’s another benefit worth considering. “If this policy were in effect today,” writes Roth, “judges and justices might be more willing to retire sooner than in their fourth decade of service, which is now all too common.”

Read the op-ed here.