d opinion this week the conservative wing of the Supreme Court raised the bar on the ability of workers' to seek justice from the federal courts, writes the Constitutional Accountability Center's (CAC) David H. Gans. The majority decision in Rent-a-Center, West v. Jackson, Gans writes, "is extremely important, and its holding will likely affect thousands of Americans, another ruling in a long campaign by corporations to supplant judicial review with arbitration."
In Rent-a-Center, the conservative wing of the high court turned away an employee's challenge of an arbitration agreement that he was required to sign before gaining employment. The former employee, Antonio Jackson, lodged a federal lawsuit against Rent-a-Center West arguing that he had been subject to racial discrimination and that the arbitration agreement should not prevent his legal action from proceeding.
Gans writes:
In Rent-a-Center, in a sharply divided 5-4 ruling, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court reached out to create a new rule of pleading that makes it difficult for hard-working Americans to seek justice in the federal courts to enforce their federal rights, including the right to be free of racial discrimination in employment.
In his speech before 2010 ACS National Convention, Sen. Al Franken (pictured) took a sharp look at the conservative wing of the Supreme Court and its increasing affinity for corporate interests.
"The Roberts Court," Franken said, "has systematically dismantled the legal protections that help ordinary people find justice when wronged by the economically powerful."
Franken then ticked off a number of high court decisions that he said have "stripped shareholders of their ability to" recover money from firms that have defrauded them, and that have "given employers more leeway to deny workers their pension benefits."
In the recent Iqbal case, Franken noted, the conservative high court majority "made it harder for everybody to get their day in court."
See video or download a transcript of Franken's speech here.
n Congress to pass legislation to reverse these decisions.
Big business versus the little guy. The Ninth Circuit running amok. The specter of "frankencrops." All of these tropes -- some familiar to Supreme Court-watchers, one more novel -- were potentially in play last month when the Court considered Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, its first case dealing with federal regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Yet the oral argument found the justices preoccupied with fine points of jurisdiction, administrative law, and equity, suggesting that their actual ruling may turn out to be a narrow one.
grievances, deterring wrongdoing, and spurring social reform." But the justices who once joined in advancing that view are no longer on the bench, "and now the Court regularly issues rulings based on a more negative view of litigation - a view that stresses litigation's burdens on defendants rather than its importance to plaintiffs, to society, and to the vindication of policies Congress enacted."