corporate interests

by Jeremy Leaming

The Roberts Court is a tool of corporate America. At least that’s the gist of a new film from Alliance for Justice, called “Unequal Justice: The Relentless Rise of the 1% Court.”

This of course is not news to those who pay attention to what the Supreme Court does, nor is it agreed upon. For instance the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Chamber of Commerce likely see the Roberts Court as a protector of American capitalism – the place where almost anyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps to become superrich.

“The Roberts Court is basically a pro-business court,” Stanford Law School Professor and ACS Board member Pamela Karlan, says in the AFJ film. “They don’t have a desire to really open the federal courts up to suits by average Americans, either workers or consumers, or people who are injured by various products; it’s a pro-business court.” (Watch the film here or view below.)

The film reminds us of the Court’s opinions that shut down a class action gender discrimination lawsuit against the retail giant Wal-Mart, overturned a woman’s lower court verdict against a company for years of gender discrimination, and found that corporate America has even more power to spend boatloads of money to sway elections.

“The Citizens United’s impact has been dramatic,” says former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold and founder of Progressives United. “And since then our system is in the worst free-fall it’s been in since the Gilded Age, probably worse.”

Even former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a rightwing policymaker, weighed in on blasting Citizens United as one of the most “misguided, naïve, uniformed, egregious decisions of the United States Supreme Court, I think in the 21st Century.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation and narrator of the 20-minute film, said individuals have been shut out of the justice system by today’s Supreme Court, which “has decided that when everyday people run up against powerful corporate interests, the big corporations almost always win.”

Some of the women behind the class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart explain their efforts to advance equality and deal with a stinging defeat.

“The women of Wal-Mart brought the case to stand up for their right to be treated equally, but they never got that far,” Heuvel said. “The decision turned on whether their claims had enough in common. The conservative majority raised the hurdle for class actions, and made it harder to prove discrimination.”

In marking the 75th anniversary of the opening of the current building that houses the Supreme Court, an editorial in The New York Times concludes that the Roberts Court “needs to work harder to live up” to a broader standard and vision. “For that,” the editorial concludes, “justice must be truly democratic, not merely reserved for the powerful.”

The editorial, “Temple to Justice,” cites authors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis who write in “Representing Justice,” that the building designed by Cass Gilbert, is “the major symbol of American courts’ essential role in our democracy and of the Supreme Court’s particular responsibility for making hard choices fairly and openly.”

But the Roberts Court, the editorial maintains, has established a record that “too often runs counter to this conception: its rulings tend to deny rather than promote access to justice. The sense of being closed off was reinforced in May when the court decided, for security reasons, to stop the public from entering the building through the main bronze doors.”

The editorial might have also mentioned some of the Roberts Court’s opinions, which some court-watchers have said skew toward corporate interests. Moreover others have noted two Roberts Court’s decisions that have tightened the pleading standards, making it much easier for cases to be tossed quickly out of the court system.