Women at Work at Walmart

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Supreme Court Tightens Rules in Class Actions,” describes a broadly based decision impacting the rights of women and other disadvantaged to groups to file and win cases based on discrimination. In an action brought to benefit 1.5 million women, they ruled that there was no commonality of purpose against them and thus disallowed the lawsuit from its inception.

The Justices split along 5-4 margins for many aspects of the ruling, thus showing the impact of the 5-4 ideological split in the Court. But all court watchers agreed upon the impact of the decision on a wide variety of class action suits because it seemingly overturns “40 years of precedents” of class action law.

Businesses, of course, hailed the ruling, but one wonders whether certain basic structures in our society meant to protect the disadvantaged have now been dismantled. It does certainly provide one additional reason to elect a Democratic President in 2012 because of the transformational aspect that the next Justice will have on the court. Right now, Justice Kennedy acts as the pivotal decision-maker on my Court rulings (though not on this one). If the next Justice is a conservative, even that breaking capability may be gone.