US Supreme Court increasingly favours the rich: Ivy League varsities

By Adam Liptak 

Supreme Court justices take two oaths. The first, required of all federal officials, is a promise to support the Constitution. The second, a judicial oath, is more specific. It requires them, among other things, to “do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” 

A new study being released on Monday from economists at Yale and Columbia contends that the Supreme Court has in recent decades fallen short of that vow. The study, called “Ruling for the Rich,” concludes that the wealthy have the wind at their backs before the justices and that a good way to guess the outcome of a case is to follow the money. 

 

The study adds to what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissent in June, called “the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this court.”  

The study found that the Supreme Court has become deeply polarized in cases pitting the rich against the poor, with Republican appointees far more likely than Democratic ones to side with the wealthy. That is starkly different from the middle of the last century, when appointees of the two parties were statistically indistinguishable on this measure. 

The general critique is not new, and it may figure in the drop in public confidence in the court in recent years, as opinion polls show. In a 2021 book, Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen, an author and former member of The New York Times’s editorial board, argued that “the court’s decisions have lifted up those who are already high and brought down those who are already low.” 

In an interview, Cohen said the new study from the economists covered ground that “some of us have been observing for a long time.” He pointed to Supreme Court decisions amplifying the role of money in politics, weakening public sector labor unions and curtailing federal regulators. “But it is great to see,” he added, “respected academics crunching the numbers and producing the data to show that this is exactly what has been going on.” 

The study showed a growing partisan divide between the justices. In 1953, the study’s authors wrote, “Democratic and Republican appointees are statistically indistinguishable, deciding on average about 45 percent of the cases in favor of the rich.” By 2022, they wrote, “that share is about 70 percent for the average Republican justice and 35 percent for the average Democratic justice.” 

“The Republican appointees have become more pro-rich at roughly twice the rate that Democrat appointees have become more pro-poor.” 

Professor Gulati was initially wary. “At first, I got the heebie-jeebies at their coding,” he said. “Undergraduates reading cases and deciding? That’s a tough judgment call for even an experienced lawyer or judge.” “In the end,” he said, “it appears to show nothing more than that Republican appointees are more conservative than they used to be.”