Businesses, detainees on high court's docket
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, who has called for more unanimity, leads a divided panel.
WASHINGTON - Big business and foreign prisoners have high hopes for the Supreme Court term that starts Monday.
Business wants protection from lawsuits. Prisoners want freedom. The court is in the middle, divided along lines that defy simple partisan calculations and led by a chief who's still finding his way.
Wild cards may yet shape the 2007-08 term. The 43 cases accepted for argument so far are only about half of the total that the court is likely to consider before the term ends in June. Some potential high-profile controversies, such as Washington's gun ban and Louisiana's death penalty for child rapists, could ripen later this year. "There will be a lot more coming," predicted Lisa Brown, executive director of the American Constitutional Society.
Still, Chief Justice John G. Roberts starts his second full year on the job certain of some things.
He knows that two cases already stand out. One involves corporate liability. One involves Guantanamo Bay prisoners. Both have attracted big guns.
Roberts also knows that he leads a closely divided court, which has defied his stated intention of forging greater unanimity. One-third of the court's decisions last term came on the narrowest margin, 5-4.
"It was a record number, at least in modern memory," Georgetown University law professor Susan Low Bloch noted. "There were also a record number of dissents announced from the bench."
Roberts knows, too, that although he's the chief, Justice Anthony Kennedy remains the court's linchpin. Kennedy was in the majority in every one of last year's 5-4 decisions. Overall, he was in the majority 97 percent of the time last term.
When it comes to court kibitzing, nothing may surpass the hearing Oct. 9 in a corporate-liability case, Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta. Nearly 30 outside groups have weighed in with amicus briefs, a number more commonly found around hot-button social controversies such as abortion.
"It's only a little bit of hyperbole to call this case security law's Roe v. Wade," Georgetown University law professor Donald Langevoort said. "It's the biggest security-law case in a decade." The case pits investors against companies. The outcome will determine, for instance, whether investors might sue an accounting firm for contributing to the misdeeds of a company such as Enron.
Scientific-Atlanta makes set-top boxes for televisions. The company allegedly sold the boxes at an inflated price to Charter Communications. Scientific-Atlanta then allegedly paid the extra money back to Charter in the form of higher ad rates. Charter used this $17 million in spurious ad revenue to inflate its profits.
Investors sued Charter. They also sued Scientific-Atlanta, but the company contends it can't be sued for securities fraud because it didn't directly deceive or manipulate the market. Investors retort that they need to be able to confront the associates of corporate bad actors.
"Scandals which have resulted in the spectacular implosion of some of Wall Street's biggest names have one thing in common; the degree to which the fraud could never have been accomplished but for the active, purposeful and intentional participation of third parties," the Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirement System argued in one brief.
The Bush administration is siding with the corporations, and the Roberts court is known as a business-friendly forum. The Chamber of Commerce, which has filed an amicus brief siding with Scientific-Atlanta, won 13 out of the 15 cases in which it filed amicus briefs last term. So far this term, according to a tally by veteran Washington lawyer Tom Goldstein's ScotusBlog, roughly half of the cases being considered deal with business. "The court's docket has increasingly been taken up with important commercial cases," Goldstein said.
Lakhdar Boumediene's case matters for other reasons. It's the latest in a string of challenges to the Bush's administration handling of terrorism defendants.
An Algerian native, Boumediene has been imprisoned for five years without facing criminal charges. The Bush administration considers him an enemy combatant. He says he's innocent. He and fellow Guantanamo Bay prisoners want the right to challenge their open-ended incarcerations through writs of habeas corpus.
The Bush administration says that the Guantanamo detainees lack that right and that, in any event, Congress stripped foreign prisoners of any potential habeas corpus claims with a 2006 law. In a rare move, the high court refused at first to hear the prisoner's appeal, then changed its mind in June.
