Litigation

Snapshot of Supreme Court Term Has Surprises

By Peter Hardin

Could conventional critiques of the current Supreme Court be dead wrong?

Veteran court-watcher Linda Greenhouse raises hard questions but doesn’t jump to any conclusions in a New York Times Opinionator commentary entitled “A Surprising Snapshot.”

Greenhouse has gathered some of her own data from decisions issued so far this term, and they challenge the frequent views that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as she writes, “are joined at the hip and that the majority tilts reflexively in favor of corporations and employers.”

From Greenhouse’s “portrait of a term in progress:”

• “Justices Scalia and Thomas have voted on opposite sides more often than they voted together” when the court issued split decisions.
• In three cases where workers sued companies over civil rights violations, the workers won each time.
• Corporate defendants have watched the high court toss out their arguments by wide margins in several cases.

While offering a detailed commentary on some of the cases, Greenhouse also writes, “At the very least, this preliminary snapshot reminds those of us (and I include myself) who think they have taken the court?s measure that assumptions are a poor substitute for close observation.”

Full post as published by The Gavel on March 24, 2011 (boomark / email).