A fresh blast of data has rolled in like a foghorn over the marble steps of the Supreme Court, and its message is blunt: the nation’s highest court is leaning sharply toward the rich. According to a sweeping analysis reported by The New York Times, economists from Columbia and Yale found that Republican-appointed justices now side with wealthier interests in about seven out of every ten economic cases. The numbers don’t whisper; they clang.
The study, titled Ruling For the Rich, sifted through every Supreme Court case involving economic issues since 1953. Researchers categorized each ruling as “pro-rich” or “pro-poor,” tracing decades of judicial behavior like archaeologists reading layers of sediment. What emerged was not a subtle drift but a widening canyon. In the 1950s, both Democratic- and Republican-appointed justices voted in favor of wealthier interests at roughly the same rate. Ideology, it seemed, bowed to the particulars of each case. Today, the pattern has snapped apart. The researchers found that you can often predict outcomes simply by identifying who has the deeper pockets, more reliably than by citing any founding-era text or interpretive philosophy.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson captured this growing fracture in a blistering dissent last summer, warning that the court’s decisions increasingly signal preferential treatment for affluent litigants and corporations. “This case gives fodder to the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens,” she wrote, giving judicial voice to what many Americans have long suspected.
The study doesn’t stop at outcomes. It also reveals that wealthy interests are more likely to have their cases heard at all, while workers, criminal defendants, and people on death row are increasingly shut out. The court’s docket, once a broad mirror of national disputes, now tilts heavily toward the powerful.
For communities already pummeled by widening inequality, the findings offer confirmation rather than revelation. If the Supreme Court’s constitutional mandate is to provide “equal right to the poor and to the rich,” this analysis suggests the scales have been quietly weighted for generations and are now leaning so starkly that the imbalance has become impossible to ignore.
