Justices’ financial disclosures reveal Justice Jackson earned over $2 million in book advances 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson received more than $2 million in book advances from Penguin Random House in 2024. The news came as part of the justices’ annual financial disclosures, which are filed each year in mid-May and then released in June. The forms, published online on Tuesday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, chronicled the payments that some justices – including Jackson, whose memoir, Lovely One, was a New York Times bestseller – received from publishing houses, as well as their reimbursements for travel, payments for teaching gigs, and investments.

The disclosures are relatively opaque and are intended to provide information about potential conflicts of interest and the justices’ compliance with ethical standards, rather than snapshots of the justices’ wealth.

The financial disclosure forms for eight of the nine justices became available at noon EDT on Tuesday. The forms were due on May 15, but federal judges and justices can receive extensions of up to 90 days to submit their forms. Forms for Justice Samuel Alito, who received an extension last year, are not yet available online.

The roughly $2 million that Jackson received in “book advance[s]” from Penguin Random House was by far the largest sum reported by any of the justices on Tuesday. But two others reported sizable sums: Justice Neil Gorsuch received $250,000 from HarperCollins, which published Over Ruled, his 2024 book with his former clerk, Janie Nitze, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor reported nearly $134,000 in book royalties and an advance from Penguin Random House.

Four of the justices spent time in the classroom during 2024. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh served as adjunct professors at Notre Dame’s law school (where Barrett taught for more than 15 years before becoming a federal judge), earning $31,815 each. Gorsuch served as an adjunct professor at George Mason University, earning $30,379.91 for an approximately two-week teaching stint in Porto, Portugal. And Chief Justice John Roberts taught a nearly two-week class on the Supreme Court in Galway, Ireland, for New England Law School.

In addition to teaching stints and book tours, lectures and roles as moot court judges also provided opportunities for the justices to travel. Barrett reported reimbursements related to travel, food, and lodging for a lecture at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, while Jackson was reimbursed for expenses related to travel and lodging for a commencement address at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta. Sotomayor was perhaps the most frequent flyer; she listed reimbursements for travel, lodging, and food that included a trip to Panama City, Panama, where she did events with law students and judges, as well as a trip to St. Paul, Minnesota, to participate in the investiture of a former clerk, Elizabeth Bentley, as a judge on the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

Justice Clarence Thomas, whose failures to disclose (among other things) private jet and superyacht trips in prior years led to investigations by ProPublica and calls for ethics reform by the justices, did not list any non-investment income, any travel reimbursements, or any gifts for 2024.