Breyer book royalties top $100K in 2015


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WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer received around $120,000 last year from the publisher of his latest book about the high court and the world.

Breyer's extra income was contained in the justices' annual financial reports that were released Wednesday by the federal judiciary.

Penguin Random House Inc. published "The Court and the World" last year.

Breyer's royalties are modest compared with two colleagues, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas, who received multimillion-dollar payments for their best-selling memoirs.

The reports detail the justices' investments, expense-paid trips and sources of outside income. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, reported a summertime trip to Japan, where he received more than $13,000 for teaching a class at the University of Tokyo in addition to having airfare, meals and lodging paid for.

Thomas said he received a bronze bust of abolitionist Frederick Douglass valued at $6,484 as a gift from Texas real estate developer Harlan Crow. The billionaire is a close friend of Thomas' and a member of the committee that created the conservative group Club for Growth.

Justice Samuel Alito unloaded more than $100,000 of ExxonMobil stock in 2015.

Alito, Breyer and Roberts are the only justices who own individual company stocks, which sometimes require them to sit out Supreme Court cases involving those businesses. Federal judges violate the law if they take part in a case involving a company they own shares in.

Roberts is participating in a case involving Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming system that the court will hear in the fall. His report for 2015 shows that he owned between $250,000 and $500,000 in Microsoft stock at the end of the year, meaning he must have sold it in the first two weeks of 2016. The court announced on January 15 that it would hear the Microsoft case.

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Associated Press writer Sam Hananel contributed to this report.

Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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