Summary

At the close of last year’s monumental Supreme Court term, commentators debated how firmly the Court stood up to President Trump. But that discussion largely ignored a clear through-line that helps explain the cases that went against the President. While Trump’s radical claims of authority sometimes lost big (or “bigly”), corporate interests got what they wanted in all the most important cases affecting business, whether they were supporting the Trump administration or opposing it. And the new term is already stacked with cases that could further unleash corporations from restraint and accountability.

For more than 15 years, the Constitutional Accountability Center has documented how the Roberts Court overwhelmingly favors corporate interests. As we put it last year, the Court “regularly issues far-reaching decisions benefitting industry, without giving comparably broad victories to plaintiffs or governments seeking to rein in corporate excess.”

The term that ended this summer illustrates just how powerful a grip corporate interests have over today’s Supreme Court—specifically, over its conservative supermajority. Industry was victorious in all the most important business cases, racking up a more impressive record than even the Trump administration. Corporations wanted to block the President’s signature tariffs, and the Court agreed. They advocated giving presidents free rein to fire the leaders of independent agency regulators, and the Court agreed, overturning a century of precedent and 150 years of congressional practice in order to fulfill one of industry’s most sought-after goals. They urged the Court to exempt the Federal Reserve Board from that sweeping ruling, and the Court agreed there too—barely disguising the fact that it was carving out an unprincipled exception for the Fed because it didn’t want to risk, as Justice Kavanaugh put it, “destabilizing the U.S. economy.”

The success of the big business agenda was thus a consistent theme of the term’s most significant cases, even though the corporate-friendly positions advocated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce won out in only a bare majority of cases overall—52 percent. That statistic alone provides an incomplete picture: As usual under the Roberts Court, corporate losses last term generally resulted in maintaining the status quo, whereas corporate victories aggressively reshaped the legal landscape.^[1]

Indeed, it was remarkable how breezily the Court blasted away precedent after precedent in order to rule for corporate interests. As noted, in Trump v. Slaughter, the conservative supermajority overruled a 90-year-old decision on which the elected branches have extensively relied in creating independent agencies that protect the public in myriad ways. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, the same supermajority overruled a 25-year-old precedent so that even more unrestricted money can flow into federal elections. And in Cisco Systems v. Doe I, the majority overruled a 20-year-old precedent to shut the courthouse doors to victims of torture and other human rights violations. In each of these cases, corporations urged the Court to discard settled precedent, and in each of these cases, the Roberts Court complied.

Notably, too, the Chamber of Commerce was victorious last term in nearly every case in which the Justices disagreed on the result. With just one exception, the Chamber won each case in which the Justices divided 5‑4, 6‑3, or 7‑2. In contrast, nearly all of the Chamber’s losses were unanimous. In other words, the Chamber lost cases only when it was clear to all the Justices that its position was wrong. But when the outcome of a case was at all debatable, the Chamber won nearly every time. And over the course of the term, the conservative bloc of six Justices voted for the Chamber’s position nearly twice as often as the more liberal bloc of three Justices.

Many cases on the docket for the new term present opportunities to continue that trend. The Chamber has already filed amicus briefs in 10 cases, each of which involves an effort to prevent companies from being answerable to the government or to the victims of their lawbreaking.

In the most closely watched case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, Exxon and other fossil fuel companies are pushing a novel constitutional argument that businesses that contribute to interstate air pollution can’t be held accountable in state court, even if their actions were illegal and resulted in concrete harms within that state. Because the Supreme Court has never said anything of the sort, and the companies can’t point to any constitutional text supporting their position, industry is largely relying on an effort to persuade the Justices that allowing state courts to hear these cases would be bad policy. The case could have significant implications for whether states can protect their residents from harms caused by multinational corporations whose reach crosses state lines.

Other cases this term will address different methods by which corporations often prevent the people they injure from obtaining redress. For instance, in Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, industry is supporting an effort to block victims of intentional discrimination from accessing the courts; to get there, it is urging the Court to retreat from established precedent and to expand judicially created limits on Congress’s power to create civil-rights remedies. In Anderson v. Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee, corporations are trying to make it harder for employees to recover for illegal mismanagement of their retirement plans. And in Salazar v. Paramount Global, the tech and entertainment industries are asking the Court to essentially rewrite a 1988 privacy law so they can continue profiting by sharing internet users’ video-watching habits without the users’ consent.

Regardless of the merits of these arguments, if the past is any guide, corporate interests have reason to be optimistic about them. Shutting the courthouse doors to injured individuals—while opening them wide for corporations—has been a hallmark of the Roberts Court.

Several cases on this year’s docket involve attempts to further hinder the federal agencies tasked with protecting health, safety, and financial security. Significantly, these cases would not even be possible if not for prior Roberts Court decisions overturning precedent and gutting agency authority. For instance, Department of Labor v. Sun Valley Orchards follows from a 2024 decision that prevented agencies from adjudicating certain charges in their own internal proceedings. And while Beaird v. United States is about criminal sentencing, corporate interests are using the case to attack the concept of judicial deference to agency expertise, building on watershed decisions from 2019 and 2024.

In the past four years, the Court has agreed to hear nearly 40 percent more business cases than during the four years before that, even as the Court’s docket continues to shrink. As oral arguments for the new term begin, the question is not whether the Justices are likely to give corporate America another winning term—instead, the question is simply how far they will go.

[1] By our count, the Chamber of Commerce’s 11 wins this term were in Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana; Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I; Exxon Mobil Corp v. Corporación CIMEX, S.A.; First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin; FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund Ltd; Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties; Monsanto Co. v. Durnell; National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC; Trump v. Cook; Trump v. Slaughter; and Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. The Chamber’s 10 losses were in Enbridge Energy, LP v. Nessel; FCC v. AT&T; Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC; Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock; Hencely v. Fluor Corp.; M&K Employee Solutions v. IAM National Pension Fund; Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC; Pung v. Isabella County, Michigan; Sripetch v. SEC; The GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal; and The Hain Celestial Group, Inc. v. Palmquist.