Chalk another one up for the Corporate Supreme Court- who recently ruled that a corporation can BAN class action lawsuits through the fine print in their contract.
This is of course, after previous Supreme Courts ruled that a person's right to sue is never lost through contracts.
If there is one body of government that is destroying America right now, it is the Supreme Court.
Deepak Gupta, an attorney at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen who represented the couple, denounced the decision and said class actions had been an essential tool to achieve justice in U.S. society.
"The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a crushing blow to American consumers and employees, ruling that companies can ban class actions in the fine print of contracts," he said.
AT&T had argued that a federal law that encourages the use of arbitration, the Federal Arbitration Act, trumped a California consumer protection law at issue in the case.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court's conservative majority agreed.
"The California law in question stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment of the purposes and the objectives of the FAA. It is accordingly preempted," Justice Antonin Scalia said for the majority in reading his opinion from the bench.
Scalia cited a federal judge's conclusion in the case that the couple was better off under the AT&T arbitration agreement than under a class action, which could take months or years and could result in their winning just a small amount of money.
The ruling, which reversed a decision by a U.S. appeals court in California, was the latest in a series by the Supreme Court in recent years that generally favored arbitration.
The court's four liberal justices dissented. "The Court is wrong to hold that the federal act preempts the rule of state law," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in dissent.
The Supreme Court case is AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, No. 09-893.