Elsewhere At The Supreme Court…

by Stuart Shapiro

DOMA and the Voting Rights Act got all the attention this week, and rightly so.  But the Roberts Court was also busy helping its favorite constituency, big business.  They made it harder to make claims of employment discrimination:

One ruling narrows the definition of what constitutes a supervisor in racial and sexual harassment cases, while the other adopts a tougher standard for workers to prove that they had faced illegal retaliation for complaining about employment discrimination.

In both cases, the rulings were decided by a 5-to-4 majority, with the dissenting justices, the court’s four most liberal members, calling on Congress to fix what they said were overly restrictive rulings.

And they made it harder for towns to require businesses to fulfill conditions when applying for environmental permits.

This thinking appears to expand the definition of what constitutes a government “taking,” potentially subjecting a whole range of land-use tools that have nothing to do with the physical taking of property to that constitutional standard for the first time. As  SCOTUSblog summarized, “The decision has the potential to significantly expand property-owners’ ability to challenge local land use regulations and fees.”

This is all part of the biggest trend in the Roberts Court:

In lower-profile cases, the court’s rulings continued to be good for business interests and bad for the Obama administration.

“We shouldn’t lose sight of the court cementing its legacy as the most pro-business court in the modern era,” said Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California and helped write a recent study of the Roberts court’s business rulings.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.