Ruling for the Rich: the Supreme Court over Time

NBER – Ruling for the Rich: the Supreme Court over Time. Andrea Prat, Fiona Scott Morton & Jacob Spitz Working Paper 34643. DOI 10.3386/w34643. Issue Date. To investigate the emergence of a pro-wealthy bias in the US Supreme Court, we develop a protocol to identify and analyze all cases involving economic issues from 1953 to the present. We categorize the parties in these cases as “rich” or “poor” according to their likelihood of being wealthy. A vote is pro-rich if that outcome would directly shift resources to the party that is more likely to be wealthy. Using this dataset, we estimate case-specific intercepts, justice-specific latent ideal points, and party-level time trends using the Bayesian methods pioneered by Martin and Quinn (2002). In the 1950s, justices appointed by the two parties appear similar in their propensity to cast pro-rich votes. Over the sample period, we estimate a steady increase in polarization, culminating in an implied party gap of 47 percentage points by 2022. The magnitude of the gap suggests the usefulness of an economic metric for prediction relative to ideologies such as originalism or textualism.

The New York Times unlocked. Supreme Court Increasingly Favors the Rich, Economists Say. A new study found that the court’s Republican appointees voted for the wealthier side in cases 70 percent of the time in 2022, up from 45 percent in 1953. “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 than ordinary citizens.” 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, Mr. 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.”…

• In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair.