Blog Post
Supreme Court Inc.
Posted by: Spencer Pahlke
March 25, 2008
Topic: Threats to Plaintiffs' Rights
"Supreme Court Inc.," from the New York Times Magazine, sheds a glaring light on the Supreme Court's recent business cases. As author and law school professor Jeffrey A. Rosen repeatedly shows, the Court has moved toward protecting big business, at the expense of American citizens' safety and health. About the only thing funny about this article is its pictures--one of which I include here to make this post less depressing:
A dominant theme in the article is the organizational efforts put into big business's 35-year campaign to whittle away safety protections and the basic right to be compensated when injured by another's carelessness. The main culprit is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an entity with endlessly deep pockets and the ability to hire dozens of leading Supreme Court advocates to present every one of big business's cases.
Not only does the Chamber hire the expensive lawyers to argue and write the main brief in the case. It also pays top dollar for "a well-coordinated campaign of 10 or 12 briefs, with each one written by a member of the elite Supreme Court bar that address the issue in enormous depth," said David Vladeck of Public Citizen, a public interest law firm.
The result? In the last term, the Chamber "filed briefs in 15 cases and its side won in 13 of them"-an unbelievable success rate on paper. But considered in the real world, it signals a serious loss of injured persons rights.
- If Arthur Andersen enables an Enron collapse, destroying investors' nest eggs, you may only recover against Andersen if it knew what they were doing was criminal. Try proving that.
- If you suffer from a predictable injury due to an obviously faulty MedTronic medical device, you cannot recover--period.
- If a company helps another company inflate its earnings--and hurt its investors--you can only recover if you relied on the fraudulent behavior.
See what I'm getting at?--the bottom line is that the companies get to keep their ill-gotten gains--and the people injured by their behavior are left out in the cold. Sound like a problem? Yes, especially when a recent Pew survey found that "65 percent of Americans agreed that corporations make excess profits."
As Allison Zieve, an attorney with Public Citizen points out, big business is changing the legal landscape, but the people most affected by those changes don't notice. In her words, "any time I talk to a nonlawyer about it, they're shocked." They're shocked because "People think: of course, if somebody makes a defective product you can sue." Nope--not if the FDA approved that product.
The bottom line is that out legal rights are not simply slipping away--they are being actively, but quietly, taken away. One right at a time, Americans are slowly losing access to one of their most venerable institutions: the courthouse, and its ability to right a wrong.
