Scales of Justice

 The Supreme Court released five opinions today—none of which was among the most high-profile and closely-watched cases of the remaining term. Nevertheless, they were quite revealing in their own way about the state of our legal system. 

Four of the five decisions today were issued with 6-3 partisan splits. And three of the five dealt in some manner with the question of who is and who is not immune to a lawsuit. 

There were of course separate and unrelated procedural and statutory issues involved in each of these three cases. But if we take a step back and look at the larger picture of what happened today—a pattern emerges. 

In one case, the Court's conservative majority ruled that a group of Chinese dissidents cannot sue a major private corporation for alleged complicity in human rights violations. 

In a second case, the conservative majority ruled that a Black Rastafarian prisoner cannot sue prison officials for violating his religious rights by forcibly shaving his head—even when he waved a judicial order in front of them telling them such an act was against the law. 

And in a third case, the conservative majority ruled that a massive transnational corporation—specifically, Exxon—can sue the Cuban government for property it claims was expropriated during the Cuban revolution. 

(This ruling for Exxon comes shortly after an earlier opinion from May, also about nationalized Cuban assets. I fear both could be used to loot the island in the event of a U.S. invasion or regime change operation of the sort Trump keeps threatening.)

The pattern here, as I say, is pretty clear. For this court, the rich and powerful get to sue to vindicate their property and contractural rights.

But when the poor and oppressed try to do the same, they encounter some invisible wall of procedural nicety that they could scarcely have foreseen. 

It seems that justice at our high court holds a scale, as Edgar Lee Masters put it, into which "gold pieces" can be tossed, "by those who dodged the strokes of the sword." 

And soon "the multitude" will see, as he put it, why justice "wears the bandage."