An example of why it matters who we elect as president. The president nominates people to the supreme court, where they can stay for life. And justices nominated by Republican presidents have been voting strongly on behalf of big business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/business/21bizcourt.html?_r=1&hp
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: June 20, 2011
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday threw out an enormous employment discrimination class-action suit against Wal-Mart that had sought billions of dollars on behalf of as many as 1.5 million female workers.
The suit claimed that Wal-Mart’s policies and practices had led to countless discriminatory decisions over pay and promotions.
The court divided 5 to 4 along ideological lines on the basic question in the case — whether the suit satisfied a requirement of the class-action rules that “there are questions of law or fact common to the class” of female employees. The court’s five more conservative justices said no, shutting down the suit and limiting the ability of other plaintiffs to band together in large class actions.
The court was unanimous, however, in saying that the plaintiffs’ lawyers had improperly sued under a part of the class-action rules that was not primarily concerned with monetary claims.
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The court did not decide whether Wal-Mart had, in fact, discriminated against the women, only that they could not proceed as a class. The court’s decision on that issue will almost certainly affect all sorts of other class-action suits, including ones brought by investors and consumers, because it tightened the definition of what constituted a common issue for a class action and said that judges must often consider the merits of plaintiffs’ claims in deciding whether they may proceed as a class.
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Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justice Scalia’s majority opinion on the broader point. But the court unanimously rejected the plaintiffs’ effort to proceed under a part of the class-action rules concerned mainly with court declarations and orders as opposed to money, one that did not require notice to the class or provide the ability to opt out of it.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented in part. Justice Ginsburg said the court had gone too far in its broader ruling in the case, Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, No. 10-277.
She would have allowed the plaintiffs to try to make their case under another part of the class-action rules. “The court, however, disqualifies the class at the starting gate” by ruling that there are no common issues, she wrote.
She added that both the statistics presented by the plaintiffs and their individual accounts were evidence that “gender bias suffused Wal-Mart’s corporate culture.” She said, for instance, that women filled 70 percent of the hourly jobs but only 33 percent of management positions and that “senior management often refer to female associates as ‘little Janie Qs.’ ”
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