Five Justices Sit Out as Court Affirms Coates Copyright Win (1)

The US Supreme Court summarily affirmed a lower court’s ruling clearing journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, Oprah Winfrey, and a host of companies of plagiarism, after five justices recused themselves from the decision.

With only four justices available to hear the case, the court lacked a quorum, and because “the qualified Justices are of the opinion that the case cannot be heard” during the high court’s next term, the court is required by statute to affirm the judgment of the lower court “with the same effect as upon affirmance by an equally divided court,” according to the order issued Monday.

Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Kentanji Brown Jackson didn’t partake in the consideration and decision of the petition, the order said. Besides Alito, the four justices who sat out the order have authored books published by Penguin Random House, whose parent company, Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, is a defendant in the case.

Advocacy group Fix the Court, which pushes for ethics rules for the Supreme Court, celebrated the recusals. “Fix the Court has for many years said that the justices should recuse from petitions involving companies—i.e., their publishers—that pay them thousands if not millions of dollars nearly every year in advances, royalties or both,” the group wrote Monday in a post on its website. “And now they’ve finally done it.”

Ralph W. Baker sued Coates, Winfrey, and a slate of companies in 2022, accusing Coates’ book “The Water Dancer” of copying Baker’s book “Shock Exchange: How Inner-City Kids From Brooklyn Predicted the Great Recession and the Pain Ahead,” according to court documents. After a New York federal court dismissed the suit, Baker appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which affirmed the district court.

“Beyond relating to Black history and culture, the overall concepts of Shock Exchange and Coates’s work bear little overlap,” the Second Circuit ruled in December.

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP represents Coates. Loeb & Loeb LLP represents Winfrey and Apple Inc.

Baker represents himself.

The case is Baker, Jr. v. Coates, U.S., No. 24-6839, order filed 5/19/25.