Last month the Minnesota Law Review published a study ranking the 35 justices who served during the last 65 years by the proportion of their pro-business votes. The study involved about 2000 decisions from 1946 to 2011.
All five of the current Supreme Court conservatives were in the top ten pro-business justices. Now get this: the two justices since 1946 most likely to decide in favor of business are Roberts and Alito, both appointed by George W. Bush.
We tend to focus on cases like gay marriage or the health care bill. The pro-business decisions are often under the radar. The full page article discussing the study that appeared in the May 5th New York Times referenced cases I had never heard of, yet the decisions affected literally millions of people.
Here are just two examples. In Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes (2011), the Court ruled 5-4 that the 1.5 million employees of Wal-Mart did not have enough in common to pursue a class action contending sex discrimination. In AT&T v. Concepcion (2011) the Court ruled that companies may avoid class action suits by using standard form arbitration agreements, which everybody signs but nobody reads.
Remember, there’s no mandatory retirement for Supreme Court justices. They must either resign or die before they can be replaced.
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