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By siding with the Supreme Court's liberal wing on two major cases last week, Chief Justice John Roberts lent credence to conservatives' concerns that they can't count on his vote. But as he moves into his second decade as the nation's 17th chief justice, Roberts is proving to be strikingly consistent in one area that conservatives applaud. He wants to close the courthouse doors to challengers with tenuous legal grounds or claims, thereby limiting the role of the judicial branch he leads.
That desire has been on display regularly during the first half of the high court's 2015 term, both in rulings Roberts joined and in those he opposed. At nearly every opportunity, he voted to limit plaintiffs' access — demanding that they prove being harmed, back up their challenge with facts, and opt for arbitration over litigation.
The chief justice wrote the court's first decision of the term, ruling Dec. 1 that a California woman had no right to sue the Austrian national railroad in a U.S. court for severe injuries she suffered on a train platform in Innsbruck.
Two weeks later, he joined the court's 6-3 majority ruling that California customers cannot join a class action lawsuit against satellite TV provider DIRECTV because a federal law favoring arbitration over litigation trumps state law.
. . . In a report on Roberts' first decade as chief justice, the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center found him uniformly stingy on standing and generous on forced arbitration. "He has repeatedly emphasized that the role of the courts should be limited, that they’re not there to solve policy debates," says Elizabeth Wydra, the group's president.
Roberts' preferences and his court's precedents are starting to filter down to lower federal courts. In the year ending Sept. 30, the number of cases filed at federal appellate, district and bankruptcy cases all declined, following a trend begun several years ago. The Supreme Court has seen a 13% drop over five years. To liberals, the trend is ominous. Brian Wolfman, co-director of the Supreme Court litigation clinic at Stanford Law School and former director of Public Citizen Litigation Group, says the trend from class action lawsuits toward arbitration penalizes consumers and workers who cannot afford to sue on their own.
"The consumer is effectively shut out from the civil justice system, and the employer or the corporation is effectively creating its own law," Wolfman says.
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