The Supreme Court is just interpreting the law. If you don’t like their interpretation, amend the law so that it’s clear. If you aren’t able to get that done, maybe it’s because a lot of people disagree with you about what the law should be.
I am not much educated in this particular issue, but I have to say the language of this blog post led me to doubt that the author is a credible source of information.
As the court becomes increasingly politicized this line of thinking becomes less of an explanation. 5-4 decisions along party lines do not inspire confidence in the court as an independent branch merely interpreting the law. Further the fact that we consider justices to have party alliance at all is a huge step back from the independence of the court.
While what you say is the intent. In practice the Supreme Court has become another legislative branch. At times applying tortuous logic to achieve desired outcomes. Both parties have benefited from this at times, but the rule of law is the biggest loser.
Saying that the 'Supreme Court is just interpreting the law' is a bad way of excusing some of the more terrible decisions they've handed down over the past few months.
With this particular case though most of the lawyers and law podcasts I follow haven't touched upon it so I can't say I'm particularly knowledgeable about it either. However I would say it's fair to look at any decisions with extreme scrutiny going forward.
What I understood as the significance of this ruling is that it establishes a different precedent for companies that are considered to participate in "two-sided markets" in relation to anti-trust law.
I would be curious to hear some commentary on the interview below that discusses this ruling, maybe it would have made for a better submission:
I find it quite surprising that there's people who still believe that. Certainly that's what the defined purpose of the court is, they very often decide things specifically contrary to what the law says.
Two cases I often bring up to show how partisan SCOTUS is are "King v. Burwell" and "Shelby County v. Holder". In both of these cases the argument for the majority opinion was that SCOTUS should act because congress won't. The interesting contrast between these two cases is that the decision in one favored the Democrats, and the other favored Republicans. They were decided largely along party lines with Roberts and Kennedy changing sides. But 7 out of the 9 justices completely reversed their logic for why they voted the way they did. In one case arguing they should leave it to congress to fix, and in the other arguing that they should act because congress won't.
"Just interpreting the law"? The article (which you mischaracterize as a blog post) says:
"Thomas’s “two-sided market” claim is an invented rule, conjured specifically to aid American Express in its quest to extract maximum revenues from retailers. “I am not aware of any support for that view in antitrust law,” wrote Justice Stephen Breyer in a scathing dissent he read partially from the bench.
So, where is the law concerning two-sided markets? Here's why Breyer writes in his dissent:
"The majority disputes my characterization of merchant-related and
shopper-related services as “complements.” See ante, at 14, n. 8.
The majority relies on an academic article which devotes one sentence
to the question, saying that “a two-sided market [is] different from
markets for complementary products [e.g., tires and gas], in which
both products are bought by the same buyers, who, in their buying
decisions, can therefore be expected to take into account both
prices.” Filistrucchi, Geradin, Van Damme, & Affeldt, Market
Definition in Two-Sided Markets: Theory and Practice, 10 J.
Competition L. & Econ. 293, 297 (2014) (Filistrucchi). I agree that
two-sided platforms—at least as some academics define them, but see
infra, at 19–20—may be distinct from some types of complements in the
respect the majority mentions (even though the services resemble
complements because they must be used together for either to have
value). But the distinction the majority mentions has nothing to do
with the relevant question. The relevant question is whether
merchant-related and shopper-related services are substitutes, one
for the other, so that customers can respond to a price increase for
one service by switching to the other service.
The "infra" is:
> What about the academic articles the majority cites? The first thing
to note is that the majority defines “two-sided transaction platforms”
much more broadly than the economists do. As the economists who
coined the term explain, if a “two-sided market” meant simply that a
firm connects two different groups of customers via a platform, then
“pretty much any market would be two-sided, since buyers and sellers
need to be brought together for markets to exist and gains from trade
to be realized.” Rochet & Tirole, Two-Sided Markets: A Progress
Report, 37 RAND J. Econ. 645, 646 (2006). The defining feature of a
“two-sided market,” according to these economists, is that “the
platform can affect the volume of transactions by charging more to one
side of the market and reducing the price paid by the other side by an
equal amount.” Id., at 664–665; accord, Filistrucchi 299. That
requirement appears nowhere in the majority’s definition. By
failing to limit its definition to platforms that economists would
recognize as “two sided” in the relevant respect, the majority carves
out a much broader exception to the ordinary antitrust rules than the
academic articles it relies on could possibly support."
Breyer ends:
"For the reasons I have explained, the majority’s decision
in this case is contrary to basic principles of antitrust law,
and it ignores and contradicts the District Court’s detailed
factual findings, which were based on an extensive trial
record."
This is in accord with the article.
So, why do you think the Supreme Court "just" interpreted the law?
What is the source of your incredulity?
Why should we think you - someone with "not much educat[ion]" in this topic - are credible? Why do you think your opinion is interesting enough to want to share?
I know some local artists and a gas station that tack on an extra fee if customer pays with a CC. They're just trying to cover the costs imposed by Amex, Visa etc. Does this decision make that illegal?
There is a LOT of nuance in every Supreme Court case
and this author either doesn't understand it, or chooses not to; and both of those options are dangerous to helping the public better understand the reasoning behind any decision handed down by the Supreme Court.
> in their quest to utterly dominate the global political economy
> featuring Justice Neil Gorsuch rather than Judge Merrick Garland
> Supreme Court rulings like the lifeline given to the practice of gerrymandering, the endorsement of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, the gutting of public sector unions, and the defense of bakers who don’t want to serve gay people
To me, there is extremely biased (political) language throughout the entire piece.
The article demonstrates an unfortunately narrow view of supreme court cases - seeing them as something that should constantly side on a certain moral answer to the object-level question (a specific case), rather than something that upholds important (or at the very least, consistent) terminal values on the meta-level.
Similar to how some people decide to side against freedom of speech when it starts to benefit their opponent more than it helps them, even though a matter like that should be decided on a higher principle than "someone says things I wish they wouldn't be allowed to say".
As far as this article goes I'm not sure I buy some of what the author is saying, partly due to the language they use, but also due to a lack of evidence and sufficient information in some areas. We'll have to wait and see.
Not sure why you are being down voted. For people down voting, let's look at some of the rulings.
1) gay marriage and the baker. This was a 7-2 ruling that basically set zero precedent. It just ruled that the council that ruled on the case originally was extremely biased in their ruling.
2) unions: only 28 states have forced union dues for collective bargaining. As well, the Federal government does not allow forced union dues. As an example of a union that exists without the protection of forced dues: the postal service union. Public unions aren't dead, but will need to try harder to keep their members now. The federal unions have shown that they can still exist without forced dues.
3) travel ban: while this law was the third attempt at it, and was rooted in some very horrible rhetoric from Trump, the judges that ruled in favor of it to reaffirm that the president has the executive power to do such. The majority was very clear they were not happy with his actions, but the law is written as such to allow him to do what he did here.
If you read the dissent on the travel ban decision, you can understand why it is bad and also deeply ironic. The Supreme Court sided with the government in the original Korematsu case saying that the government did indeed have the constitutional right to throw people of Japanese descent into camps.
They overturned Korematsu in this decision, only to uphold something similar with similar racist sentiment behind it. Whenever you think of the Supreme Court affirming that the executive has the power to do something, you should always keep in mind that they had originally considered the executive had the power to toss people in camps for 'security' purposes.
And on a similar note, the punting they did on the Baker case was almost entirely made up by the court based on a completely irrelevant line by someone tangentially related to the case. I highly recommend listening to episode 180 of the Opening Arguments podcast to understand how utterly ridiculous their decision was.
Baker: there were a number of reasons I believe SCOTUS punted on the case. (1) it was founded on a bad initial ruling and they would rather have a cleaner cut case to actually evaluate. (2) It originated in 2014, before the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case (that allowed gay marriage). So Colorado didn't even allow gay marriage yet. With the above 2 points, it complicated their ruling to be able to set a larger precedent.
Travel Ban: Korematsu was about American citizens being detained, and as the majority said was a horrible ruling the day it was set. The travel ban is going after countries that are unable to vet their citizens that were trying to travel to the US (non-US citizens). US Citizens are able to apply to get around the ban. Also, there were a few countries on the list that were not Muslim majority countries (Venezuela, North Korea, and Chad). The law outlined ways for countries to get off the list, which Chad succeeded in doing.
For the first: your facts of the case are wrong. It originated in 2012 and in 2014 Colorado allowed for same-sex marriage. However that's irrelevant to the case because even though same-sex marriage was not allowed, Colorado had the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act prior which prevented businesses from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, among other things. Saying it was a bad initial case is outright wrong considering the facts they make up in their ruling.
The travel ban is also incredibly racist. North Korea being on the list doesn't matter because North Korea rarely allows people to travel to the United States and the Venezuelan ban only bars a few high-level officials. Those countries added to the list are an excuse for the government to say 'look we're not racist we have non-Muslim countries on the list!' while the rest have little to no actual security rationale behind it.
I wonder if anyone else finds this disturbing? I thought the Supreme Court was supposed to be beyond partisan politics. Why would "party lines" have anything to do with this case, or is it some kind of coincidence? And which party has more reason to help credit card companies, and why?
I hate America sometimes. All that shit we learned in civics class was just idealistic propaganda if it all comes down to party lines.
> Unions say that reasoning is flawed. Nonmembers are already entitled to refunds of payments spent on political activities, like advertising to support a political candidate.
> Collective bargaining is different, the unions say, and workers should not be free to reap the benefits of such bargaining without paying their fair share of the costs.
I've always wondered: Can I choose to bargain for myself, and not have the union do it?
Best as I can tell, the answer is: No. The union forces me to pay them to bargain for me.
That is unethical.
> should not be free to reap the benefits
Every single article on the subject always implies that there are benefits. What if I feel they are actually drawbacks?
An easy test: If they were actually benefits people would chose to use them, no? So let people work under union contracts, or on their own, as they chose. But you'll never see a union suggest that, will you? They always want to force people to "gain the benefits".
To your first point, non-union companies allow, in fact require each person to bargain for themselves. Generally the power imbalance at a reasonably large company means that employees accept what they're offered, because their only alternative is to quit and be replaced easily. This is the reason that groups of workers organize to form unions in the first place.
Game theory suggests that each person should want to avoid paying union dues, and yet have everyone else pay theirs, so that the union negotiates good rates for all, including them. The obvious outcome of voluntary dues, then, is for each person to eventually realize this and stop paying their own dues, so that the union collapses, shifting all power back to the employer and making employment worse for all. Humans are short-term thinkers, though, so that would be nigh-inevitable in most cases.
Eventually, see point one again. The mandatory dues are an attempt to stop the several-year cycle of shifting back and forth between a union and non-union shop, I believe.
I'll add a concrete example. My dad worked for a TV station. Of the 5 VHF stations in town, one was public TV, three were network, and one was independent.
One of the other stations was union. My dad's company was not. The owner of his company did not want the union. The owner kept the union out by paying everyone $1 more than their counterparts in the union station.
My dad thought this was great. He got the benefits of the union - higher wages - without paying union dues.
I look at it and think about how Dad could have gotten higher wages by being represented by a stronger union. Union power, like most things, is non-linear. A bigger union can pay for better negotiators than a small union can. That's a simple economy of scale - a larger union can have dedicated, full-time lawyers, for example, who stay on top of the laws and potential changes to the law.
When the owner died, and the station got bought out by a private equity firm, the firm did the usual round of layoffs, and it sold off the company into parts. A union might have been able to fight some of those layoffs. But there was no union.
But when he boasted about how he made more because he was non-union, such alternatives and futures were out-of-sight/out-of-mind. As you say, "Humans are short-term thinkers".
Let's say you work for the movie industry. The union requires that union members only work on union productions. If a union member works on a non-union production then they are kicked out of the union. Most people want to be in the union, which means most productions are unionized, even though the employer does not require union membership, the union cannot penalize the employer, and hiring a non-union member is not illegal.
Do you consider that arrangement to be ethical? If it's unethical, what is the basis by which you consider it ethical to force unionized employees to continue work with someone who is not a member of the union, instead of letting them quit their job?
I know this isn't what you asked, but it gets to the heart of the issue - unions are based on the free association right of employees to quit, and their free speech right to protest.
Current union power in the US is based on a compromise. Some union practices are banned, but in exchange they are also given some powers. For example, union members are not allowed to participate in 'wildcat strikes', that is, they cannot strike without permission of the union. On the other hand, unions are allowed to seek the monopoly right to negotiate on the behalf of all covered workers, including non-union ones.
I can well understand what people can think it's unethical to force people to be represented by the union, even if it's not wanted.
But ethics are not so simple. I strongly disagree with the Taft-Hartley Act, and the various so-called "Right-To-Work" laws, IMO correctly called "Right-To-Work-For-Less" laws.
I think wildcat strikes should not be illegal, just like I think jurisdictional strikes, closed shops, monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns, and the other practices prohibited by Taft-Hartley should not be illegal.
More importantly, I can't see how any ethics which requires people be allowed to negotiate on their own doesn't also end up allowing many union practices which are now banned.
Can you explain to me why wildcat strikes should be banned?
I am not much educated in this particular issue, but I have to say the language of this blog post led me to doubt that the author is a credible source of information.