Business and the Roberts Court Revisited
The Roberts Court has long been described as a “pro-business” court. News reports summarizing John Roberts’ first term as Chief Justice described the Court as business friendly. A New York Times Magazine profile was simply labeled “Supreme Court, Inc.” Activist groups tallied the win-loss record of the Chamber of Commerce, and academics published quantitative assessments purporting to show that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts was more sympathetic to business interests than any Court in decades.
I have been skeptical of the “pro-business” label as a useful description of the Court from the outset. Quantitative assessments of the Court’s decision-making have their place, but qualitative assessments of the Court’s decisions is necessary to evaluate the extent to which the Court’s decisions are benefitting or assisting business interests. Further, insofar as business groups tend to win in some sorts of cases but not others, it is more useful to describe the Court’s jurisprudence with more nuance and precision. A simply hashtag label is not that informative.
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My 2016 book, Business and the Roberts Court sought to take a deeper look into the Court’s handling of business-related cases. In this volume, subject-matter experts looked at different aspects of the Court’s jurisprudence. Was the conclusion that the Court is “pro-business”? Here is how I summarized the findings:
Where business interests seek outcomes that are in line with the justices’ doctrinal commitments, they can expect to prevail. Yet where business interests are unable to marshal arguments that appeal to the justices’ underlying judicial philosophies, their odds are less favorable, no matter how much business groups may believe
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