The Court After the Bush Remodeling
By Simon Lazarus and Rochelle Bobroff have more on Alito in the wake of his casting the decisive vote in the awful Ledbetter decision:
In the meantime, they can expect more opinions in this vein from the Roberts Court. Justice Alito’s solicitude for employers is not new. Before joining the Supreme Court in February 2006, as an appellate judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, he repeatedly pressed legal theories or factual interpretations, usually in dissent, designed to keep juries from hearing employment discrimination claims. In one such case, the majority opinion observed that his position “would immunize an employer” even if he or she were motivated by “conscious racial bias.” In another, the majority noted that if his approach represented the law, “few if any [discrimination] cases would survive.”
And, needless to say, this couldn’t have been more predictable. But he stretches the law to slavishly restrict discrimination claims in a non-acerbic manner, and he likes baseball, so he’s really a moderate!