“Families purchase multiples and people will be upset if they are unable to get in line because the book required is sold out.” “For an event with 1,000 people and they have to have a copy of Just Ask to get into the line, 250 books is definitely not enough,” the aide, Anh Le, wrote staffers at the Multnomah County Library. Then, as the public cost of hosting the event soared almost tenfold, a Sotomayor aide emailed with a different, urgent concern: She said the organizers did not buy enough copies of the justice’s book, which attendees had to purchase or have on hand in order to meet Sotomayor after her talk. They put in long hours and accommodated the shifting requests of Sotomayor’s court staff. In 2019, as Sotomayor traveled the country to promote her new children’s book, “Just Ask!,” library and community college officials in Portland, Oregon, jumped at the chance to host an event. Justices also lent the allure of their high office to partisan activity. Besides book sales, appearances by the justices were used in hopes of raising money at schools, which often invited major contributors to the events. The documents obtained by AP show that the justices’ conduct spans their conservative-liberal split. It can double as an all-expenses-paid trip Justices teach when the Supreme Court isn’t in session. “The problem at the Supreme Court is there’s no one there to say whether this is wrong.” “This is one of the most basic tenets of ethics laws that protects taxpayer dollars from misuse,” said Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics and current general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington. But when it comes to promoting her literary career, Sotomayor is free to do what other government officials cannot because the Supreme Court does not have a formal code of conduct, leaving the nine justices to largely write and enforce their own rules. In her case, the documents reveal repeated examples of taxpayer-funded court staff performing tasks for the justice’s book ventures, which workers in other branches of government are barred from doing. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. She has benefited, too - from schools’ purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she has written over the years. WASHINGTON (AP) - For colleges and libraries seeking a boldfaced name for a guest lecturer, few come bigger than Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice who rose from poverty in the Bronx to the nation’s highest court.
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