Constitutional Law

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Supreme Court, Corporate Misconduct, and Regulation

This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on corporate misconduct and laws regulating corporations. In a letter to the Committee, the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive think-tank and law firm, criticized the Court’s “recent trend toward constraining the right of the people to hold corporations accountable for misconduct . . . [as contrary to] the text, history, and structure of our Constitution.”

The letter’s authors criticized recent Supreme Court decisions as showing “a disdain for the voice of the people as expressed through the powerful body of the civil jury,” while "providing favorable treatment to corporations.”

As examples, they cite the Supreme Court’s decision in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, which dramatically reduced a jury verdict awarding punitive damages against Exxon for its culpability in causing an oil spill in Alaska by a factor of 10, and Preston v. Ferrer,  where the Court interpreted the Federal Arbitration Act to “force litigants into business-friendly arbitration,” thereby “improperly sacrific[ing] the right of access to the courts to the goals of economic efficiency and expediency.”

In a blogpost, the Center condemned the Court’s recent decisions as “both pro-corporate and anti-originalist.”

In his written statement, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said:

For all the talk about judges who purport to be ‘strict constructionists,’ a majority of the Supreme Court has repeatedly failed to credit the fact that the right to a civil jury trial is enshrined in our Constitution. One would expect that, in particular, those justices who claim to be ‘originalists’ would uphold the Framers’ emphasis on the role of the jury. Ironically, there is no mention of corporations anywhere in the Constitution.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on July 23, 2008 (boomark / email).