The current Supreme Court is friendly toward big business. How friendly? If the court’s trajectory continues, perhaps as friendly as any court dating back to the Lochner era, when laissez-faire policies permeated the court’s rulings. Prominent scholars, most notably Lee Epstein, William Landes and Richard Posner, have found empirical support for the proposition that the current court is more pro-business than previous iterations. (That study was recently updated through the 2015 term.) This post uses data from the 2015 through 2017 terms to add to this discussion. In particular it seeks to locate the trajectory of the court with the possible addition of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the October 2018 term. Although the court’s right and left sides found themselves on opposite ends of business rulings during the October 2017 term, we might expect an even stronger pro-business court next term with the addition of another likely predictably pro-business justice in Kavanaugh.
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