A Surprising Snapshot
A look at the Supreme Court decisions this term reveals that corporations don’t always win, employees don’t always lose, and Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas don’t always agree.
This Opinionator NY Times piece was an interesting perspective on the decisions of the current term of the United States Supreme Court. Refreshing to see it in this light, instead of through the prism of MSNBC or Fox News. Here is an excerpt:
• In decisions that have split the court in any direction, Justices Scalia and Thomas have voted on opposite sides more often than they voted together. They differed in all three of the non-unanimous criminal-law cases that the court has decided so far.
• Employees suing companies for civil rights violations have won all three cases decided so far, two of them by votes of 8-0 (with Justice Elena Kagan recused).
• By wide margins, the court has rejected arguments put forward by corporate defendants in several cases. It refused to permit corporations to claim a personal-privacy exemption from disclosure of law-enforcement records under the Freedom of Information Act. It permitted a liability suit to proceed against an automobile manufacturer for not installing the safest kind of back-seat passenger restraint. And in a unanimous opinion on Tuesday, the court refused to throw out a lawsuit by investors alleging that a drug manufacturer’s failure to disclose reports that some patients using its cold remedy had lost their sense of smell amounted to securities fraud.