Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal News Blogs -> Lawbeat

Legal News

: Lawbeat

Making sense of the Wyeth ruling

By Mark Obbie

Does the Supreme Court favor businesses, or the people who sue businesses? Rather than rely on lazy, oversimplified, ideological labeling -- the "conservative" and "pro-business" Roberts Court took a surprising detour into pro-plaintiff, liberal territory in last week's decision in Wyeth v. Levine -- two Supreme Court beat reporters today offer lessons in nuance and legal substance by going beyond the strict confines of the decision's outcome. David Savage of the LA Times and Robert Barnes of The Washington Post take separate routes to the same basic point: how and why the Court, or a particular justice, reached the liberal-pleasing result that it did. Savage looks at the question through Justice Clarence Thomas' reasoning and record (Thomas concurred in the decision's result, but his approach would have gone further than the holding). Barnes takes square aim at the meaning of the case by showing how different decisions wrestled with distinct questions of statutory or regulatory interpretation. Seemingly contradictory outcomes -- one favoring business, one favoring plaintiffs -- emerge in more understandable form when shown in their real form: not as results-driven policymaking but as legal reasoning. Neither story is bound to win plaudits from experts in these areas of law, because the stories are themselves simplifications of much more complicated principles and details. And partisans will no doubt bash or praise the justices for giving their side a defeat or a victory. But Savage and Barnes served their readers, the general public -- albeit a smart and curious segment of it -- by striking a reasonable balance between overwhelming detail and dumbed-down caricature.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on March 08, 2009 (boomark / email).