Study Finds Supreme Court More Likely to Rule for Wealthy, Economists Say

A new study by economists at Yale and Columbia, titled "Ruling for the Rich" and being released on Monday, concluded that the Supreme Court has increasingly sided with wealthier parties in economic cases. The study reported that the court’s Republican appointees voted for the wealthier side about 70 percent of the time in 2022, up from about 45 percent in 1953.

The authors categorized parties as rich or poor "according to their likelihood of being wealthy" and counted a justice’s vote as favoring the rich if the outcome would directly shift resources to the party more likely to be wealthy. Yale undergraduates applied a transparent coding protocol to decisions involving economic issues from 1953 on, discarding unanimous or hard-to-categorize cases and using quality checks.

The study used Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency as an example it classified as favoring the poor. The analysis found a growing partisan divide: by 2022 the average Republican justice favored the wealthy in roughly 70 percent of these cases, while the average Democratic justice did so in about 35 percent.

The authors wrote that Republican appointees have become more pro-rich at roughly twice the rate that Democratic appointees have become more pro-poor. Legal scholars reacted with mixed views. Some commentators welcomed data that they said confirmed long-standing critiques, while others questioned the methodology and certain assumptions.

Key Topics

Politics, Supreme Court, Massachusetts V. Epa, Yale, Columbia, Republican Appointees