Access to Justice

by Jeremy Leaming

Too many progressives have faltered in highlighting the impact nine justices on the nation’s highest court can have on the lives of millions of Americans. The Constitutional Accountability Center’s Simon Lazarus lays the case out over at CAC’s Text and History Blog, noting that during the second presidential debate an opportunity was missed to show how the conservative justices of the Roberts Court increasingly advance corporate interests, while making life tougher on individuals.

As Lazarus notes, a question from the town hall audience prompted the candidates try and address the ongoing lack of pay equity – women still earn significantly less than their male counterparts. President Obama responded by highlighting his signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The law was named after the Alabama women who struggled to hold Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company accountable for paying her far less than men at the company doing the same work. After Ledbetter (pictured) sued the company, a jury found in her favor and awarded her hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay. But the company appealed and the case eventually reached the high court in 2007. The rightwing bloc of the Supreme Court in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire reversed course and found that Ledbetter could not move forward with her lawsuit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 seeking equal pay for equal work. The rightwing justices essentially said that Ledbetter had waited too long to bring the action, even though she did not discover the discrimination until her retirement from the Goodyear Tire plant.

During this year’s ACS National Convention, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who lodged a dissent in Ledbetter, said the decision was “entirely out of touch with the real world of work.”

The Ledbetter Act trumps the high court’s out-of-touch majority opinion by allowing for a realistic timeframe for workers to bring employment discrimination cases.

But Lazarus says progressives, including the president, have failed to “take a cue from Senator [Patrick] Leahy, who has held numerous hearings over the past four years to ‘shine a light on how the Supreme Court’s decisions affect Americans’ everyday lives.’”

By Jeremy Leaming

Special interests are ratcheting up their efforts to influence the make-up of state courts, which handle the bulk of the country’s legal actions. These special interests, in large part, are riled over certain rulings of state courts in Iowa, Florida and a string of others, and willing to spend boatloads of money to change those courts. 

Recently this blog noted the 2010 effort by Christian rightists to unseat Iowa Supreme Court justices for their involvement in a 2009 opinion that invalidated a law barring same-sex marriage. (In Varnum v. Brien, the Iowa higher court said the law violated the state constitution’s equal protection clause.) The effort was led by groups, such as the National Organization for Marriage, the American Family Association and other religious groups bent on demonizing the LGBT community, in part by opposing equality efforts. That effort was successful in removing three of the Iowa State Supreme Court justices, and some of those same groups are gunning for another justice involved in the Varnum majority – Justice David Wiggins. The New York Times blasted the effort to oust Wiggins in a so-called retention vote on Election Day as a “battle over the future of a fair and independent judiciary.” The Times’ editorial went on to state that retention votes were meant to remove judges from the bench because of corruption or incompetence, not because of unpopular rulings.

In a panel discussion organized by Justice at Stake for this year’s Lavender Law conference, several of the panelists noted that state judges who have issued rulings in favor of marriage equality have often been the target of efforts to yank them from the bench. Lambda Legal’s Eric Lesh said courts nationwide “face real threats from well-funded, special interest groups that seek to politicize our judiciary and undermine the integrity of our justice system.”

It’s not just state court opinions advancing equality that are triggering threats to state courts.