WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, now the lone branch of government dominated by Republican appointees, continued this year to lean to the right on matters of race, crime, the environment and campaign funding.
But the just-completed term, which began amid last fall's collapse on Wall Street, also saw a tilt to the left and away from the George W. Bush administration's hands-off policy toward business. Reversing the recent trend, the justices this year cleared the way for consumer-driven lawsuits against banks and the makers of drugs and cigarettes.
Overall, the court remained closely divided in a year in which neither the conservative nor liberal bloc could claim major wins. Now the justices will be on recess for two months, while the Senate decides whether to approve President Obama's first nominee to the court.
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as expected, she will take her seat in early September, just in time to hear a potentially momentous case on whether corporations have the right to spend freely to influence elections.
Before this year, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and the court's conservatives had handed down a series of pro-business rulings. They made it much harder for cheated investors to sue companies for stock frauds. They protected makers of medical devices from being sued by patients when the products proved defective. In 2007, they shielded thousands of mortgage lenders from being sued by state attorneys general who had accused them of luring consumers with deceptive loans. The Bush administration said these lenders were subject only to federal regulation.
But the housing crisis, the Wall Street collapse and the Bernard L. Madoff scandal exposed the weakness of the federal government's regulation of business. And this year, the court sounded quite a different note.
Its most significant business case was heard the same week as the November election. At issue was whether drug makers were shielded from being sued by injured patients. Bush administration lawyers had supported the drug makers and said that federal regulations trumped state consumer-protection laws. The plaintiff, Diana Levine, had an arm amputated after she was injected with a federally approved anti-nausea drug with a history of causing gangrene.
In Wyeth vs. Levine, the court's liberal bloc, joined by Kennedy, rejected the shield for the drug makers and upheld the consumer's right to sue. In a parallel ruling, the court said that federal warning labels did not shield tobacco firms from being sued for falsely advertising "light" cigarettes.
