> The Dirks case is an example of what has been called the “white collar paradox” – that conservative Supreme Court justices, who rarely vote to reverse convictions of poor criminal defendants, have shown a clear sympathy for rich ones. The conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, one study found, voted for defendants in about 7 percent of non-white-collar criminal cases – and 82 percent of white-collar ones.
> After Watergate, Congress passed a tough campaign finance law, with strict limits on both contributions and expenditures. In 1976, the Court struck down the expenditure limits, on the dubious theory that money equals speech under the first amendment. That let wealthy people spend as much as they wanted to elect candidates, and the Court has been opening the floodgates further ever since. In 2010, in Citizens United v. F.E.C., it took the radical step of saying that corporations have the same right to spend money to elect candidates as people do.
> In a series of rulings, including a high-profile one against Wal-Mart in 2011, it has made it far harder for workers and consumers to band together in class action lawsuits, which are often the only way for working-class people to get justice. In the Wal-Mart case, the Court threw out a class action by about 1.5 million female workers, insisting they did not have enough in common to sue together. The Court has also decided that the Due Process Clause bars what it views as excessively large punitive damage awards. It then used that made-up doctrine to drastically reduce jury awards against Exxon Shipping for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and State Farm over its mistreatment of a physically disabled customer.
