{"id":434,"date":"2013-05-07T15:28:23","date_gmt":"2013-05-07T15:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fslawfirm.com\/blog\/?p=434"},"modified":"2013-05-07T15:28:23","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T15:28:23","slug":"supreme-court-pro-business-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fslawfirm.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/supreme-court-pro-business-decisions\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Pro-Business Decisions"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

Recent Supreme Court Decisions Favor Businesses over Consumers, Employees <\/em><\/p>\n

\n

A recent Minnesota Law Review article<\/a> studied 2,000 Supreme Court decisions from 1946 to 2011, and confirmed that the current Supreme Court is, by a wide margin, the most business-friendly Court during the time period.\u00a0 <\/span>All five of the Court\u2019s conservative-leaning judges (John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) rank among the top 10 most pro-business Justices in the last 65 years, with Roberts and Alito at the top of the rankings.\u00a0 <\/span>Not surprisingly, as discussed by Adam Liptak in the New York Times<\/a>, this empowerment of big business often comes at the expense of consumers and employers.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Recent Supreme Court decisions have granted big business never-before-seen political influence, while simultaneously insulating them from liability by limiting access to courts and disfavoring class actions.\u00a0 <\/span>In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission<\/em>, the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment to allow corporations to spend freely in political elections, which led to unprecedented spending in the 2012 election.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

However, recent decisions that have not received as much mainstream attention are likely to have an equally significant impact on big business.\u00a0 <\/span>Through its decisions in Wal-Mart v. Dukes<\/a>, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion<\/a>, and Comcast Corp. v. Behrend<\/a>, the Court has made it increasing difficult for consumers and employees to bring class action lawsuits when they believe they have been harmed by one of these big corporations.\u00a0 <\/span>Wal-Mart<\/em> and Comcast<\/em> both placed heightened, fact-intensive requirements on establishing that employees or consumers were sufficiently \u201csimilarly situated\u201d to be certified as a class.\u00a0 <\/span>Meanwhile, AT&T Mobility<\/em> arguably allows companies to block class actions before they start by strong-arming employees and consumers into signing arbitration agreements, which require them to vindicate their alleged harms through individual arbitrations instead of as a class. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, because class actions are among the only ways to vindicate small harms that have befallen many people, this often means that the harmed individuals have no recourse at all.\u00a0 <\/span>Companies that charge illegal sales taxes, as alleged in AT&T Mobility<\/em>, or collude to violate anti-trust laws, as alleged in Comcast<\/em>, are causing relatively small harms to thousands of people.\u00a0 <\/span>By requiring more and more of these individuals to pursue their claims on their own, instead of as part of a class, the Supreme Court is allowing big businesses to violate the law without a real threat to their bottom line.\u00a0 <\/span>As Arthur R. Miller, law professor at New York University wrote in his Reflections on Civil Procedure<\/a>: \u201cRealistically, the choice for class members is between collective access to the judicial system or no access at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 
\nRecent Supreme Court Decisions Favor Businesses over Consumers, Employees <\/p>\n

A recent Minnesota Law Review article studied 2,000 Supreme Court decisions from 1946 to 2011, and confirmed that the current Supreme Court is, by a wide margin, the most business-friendly Court during the time period.\u00a0 All five of the Court\u2019s conservative-leaning judges (John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) rank among the top 10 most pro-business Justices in the last 65 years, with Roberts …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23,1,22,27,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-action","category-employment-law","category-flsa-2","category-ny-labor-law","category-overtime-2"],"yoast_head":"\nSupreme Court Pro-Business Decisions - 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