Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned last summer that her conservative colleagues on the bench were doing irreparable harm to the court’s image as they increasingly sided with the rich and powerful, and a new study published Monday appeared to validate those fears.
Published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the study found that since the 1950s, conservative Supreme Court justices increasingly issued rulings that favored the wealthy when compared to their liberal counterparts.
Researchers analyzed 1,782 Supreme Court cases and classified justices’ votes as either “pro-rich” – which they defined as a vote that produced an “outcome [that] would directly shift resources to the party that is more likely to be wealthy” – or “pro-poor.” Researchers found that conservative justices cast “pro-rich” votes 70% of the time by the end of 2022, a stark contrast to liberal justices’ 35% during the same time period.
The findings of the study were remarkably similar to the fears Jackson voiced back in June when she issued a fiery dissent in Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA, a case where fossil fuel companies sought the right to challenge federal climate regulations, and a case that ultimately saw the conservative-leaning Supreme Court side with the fossil fuel giants.
“Over time, such selectivity begets judicial overreach and erodes public trust in the impartiality of judicial decision making. Today’s ruling runs the risk of setting us down that path,” Jackson wrote back in June in her dissent.
“The Court shelves its usual case-selection standards to revive a fuel-industry lawsuit that all agree will soon be moot (and is largely moot already). And it rests its decision on a theory of standing that the Court has refused to apply in cases brought by less powerful plaintiffs. This case gives fodder to the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens.”
