Private: A Troubling Trend: Supreme Court Continues to Limit Access to the Court System

The Supreme Court continues to limit the ability of people to seek justice in the courts, Public Citizen’s Allison Zieve tells ACSblog. Zieve cited as an example, the high court’s April opinion in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, which found in favor of AT&T’s effort to bar consumers from joining in a class action to challenge the wireless company’s charges.

In an interview following ACS’s 2010 – 2011 Supreme Court Term Review, Zieve, litigation director for Public Citizen, said:

It seems to me that the court is consistently unsympathetic to class action suits, to broader suits and has a distinct anti-litigation trend in a lot of its cases. The Court doesn’t seem to feel that state law claims, tort claims, consumer protection claims, have a lot of value, and so not only do plaintiffs frequently lose in those cases, they do so through opinions that don’t really show much respect for the civil justice system. So, I think that raises a significant concern about people’s ongoing access to the courts, access to court remedies. There’s a lot of situations in which state law provides the only remedy, and the Supreme Court has been cutting those access to the court system off through a very sympathetic view of arbitration, a broad reading of the federal arbitration act, through preemption, standing requirements that have been made more and more stringent over the years; so there’s a lot of ways the courthouse doors are being closed to just regular people.

For more analysis and information about corporate interests before the Supreme Court and other federal courts, visit a the ACS Web Page, Corporations and the Courts, with resources that include two ACS Issue Briefs, “Why Does Business (Usually) Win in the Roberts Court?,” “Judicial Hostility to Litigation and How it Impairs Accountability for Corporations and Other Defendants,” and a recent article from the official ACS Journal, the Harvard Law & Policy Review, called “Class Action at the Crossroads: An Answer to Wal-Mart v. Dukes.”

Watch Zieve’s interview below or download a video podcast of the interview. The interview can also be seen here.

Access to Justice, Arbitration, Procedural Barriers to Court, Rules of Civil Procedure and Pleading Standards, Supreme Court