Supreme Court Litigator: Past Term ‘Tough for Consumers’

by Jonathan Arogeti

This past Term of the Supreme Court proved “very tough for consumers,” says Robert Peck, president of the Center for Constitutional Litigation, in a video interview with The National Law Journal’s Tony Mauro.

“This is a court that doesn’t seem to like litigation, and especially doesn’t like litigation against business,” Peck said. “They’ve taken a number of cases [in] which plaintiffs are now going to have great difficulty achieving justice and recompense for things that happen at the hands of corporations.”

Peck discusses two of the cases that had the greatest impact on litigants: PLIVA v. Mensing and Wal-Mart v. Dukes.

The Supreme Court’s decision in PLIVA v. Mensing, which limited the ability of consumers to file failure to warn lawsuits against drug companies, has caused “turmoil” for pending litigation around the country “as motions to dismiss have been filed not just over failure to warn cases but over defective design [and] other issues that come up in these generic drug cases,” according to Peck.

While the long-term consequences of the Wal-Mart holding have yet to be realized, when ACSblog spoke with lead plaintiff Betty Dukes after the delivery of that decision, she said:

It is not easy to take on your own employee. It is even more difficult when that employer is the biggest company in the world. In this country, there are many Betty Dukes who want their voices to be heard when they are denied equal pay and equal promotion. For many of these women, I am afraid that the court’s ruling will leave them without having their due day in court.

[photo courtesy of] LadyofProcrastination