The two most pro-business justices in modern history.
Surprise:
It's the current one!
Thus far, this term has proved to be no exception, with a 6-1 win rate by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Last month, three professors who are prominent in the conservative law and economics movement published what may be the most rigorous study yet on business success before the high court. And after analyzing the some 2,000 decisions between 1946 and 2011 under various rubrics for what constitutes a business win before the court, the study confirmed previous conclusions that the Roberts court is significantly more pro-business than its predecessors. What’s more, they found that the most pro-business justices of all since 1965 are George W. Bush’s two appointees to the court: Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
You can read the
Minnesota Law Review article
here; it is authored by scholars Lee Epstein, Bill Landes, and the Hon. Richard Posner. In the conclusion, they note:
Whether measured by decisions or Justices’ votes, a plunge in warmth toward business during the 1960s (the heyday of the Warren Court) was quickly reversed; and the Roberts Court is much friendlier to business than either the Burger or Rehnquist Courts, which preceded it, were. The Court is taking more cases in which the business litigant lost in the lower court and reversing more of these—giving rise to the paradox that a decision in which certiorari is granted when the lower court decision was anti-business is more likely to be reversed than one in which the lower court decision was pro-business. The Roberts Court also has affirmed more cases in which business is the respondent than its predecessor Courts did....
We find that five of the ten Justices who, over the span of our study (the 1946 through 2011 Terms), have been the most favorable to business are currently serving, with two of them ranking at the very top among the thirty-six Justices in our study.... We find that after the appointment of Roberts and Alito, the other three conservative Justices on the Court became more favorable to business, and we conjecture that the three may not have been as interested in business as Roberts and Alito and decided to go along with them to forge a more solid conservative majority across a broad range of issues.
The NYT's Adam Liptak has much more, and lord knows I've catalogued a lot of these decisions:
fair wages claims,
gender discrimination at Walmart,
employment arbitration agreements,
mandatory individual arbitration of consumer disputes,
turning away suits against multinational corporations for human rights abuses and
torture claims,
impairing union organizing ability,
supporting corporate data miners against privacy claims,
Citizens United,
the Ledbetter decision...