President Calvin Coolidge, in a January 1925 speech to newspaper editors, asserted that “the chief business of the American people is business.” The claim, although far from true, did capture the short-lived success of business leaders in structuring the country’s social institutions for the benefit of the wealthy.
Tragically, we appear well into another period when business needs and desires are promoted as consistent with American values and enshrined into law. The pro-business orientation of the current Roberts Supreme Court highlights this reality. As Lee Epstein and Mitu Gulati show in their paper “A Century of Business in the Supreme Court, 1920-2020”:
Continue readingthe Roberts Court may be the most pro-business Court in a century. The win rate for business in the Roberts Court, 63.4 percent, is 15 percentage points higher than the next highest rate of business wins over the past century.
Reports from the Economic Front 