Donations to judges’ campaigns often equal friendly rulings

WASHINGTON — State supreme court justices are favoring the corporate interests that finance their election campaigns, a comprehensive new study concludes.

With more judicial elections now awash in dollars, the study of several thousand court decisions found a relationship between business-affiliated contributions and how justices voted. The more business money a supreme court justice has received, the more likely she or he is to support business litigants, according to the American Constitution Society study.

“We have reason to be worried,” study author Joanna Shepherd said Tuesday. “Business groups tend to spend far more on judicial elections than any other interest group.”

An economist and associate professor at Emory University Law School, Shepherd analyzed 2,345 court decisions issued between 2010 and 2012, along with more 175,000 contribution records.

The study found elected judges who receive 1 percent of contributions from the business sector vote for pro-business position about 46 percent of the time; judges who receive a quarter of their contributions from business vote with business 62 percent of the time and judges who receive half from business vote with business about two-thirds of the time.

As with legislative campaign contributions, though, the new analysis raises a question about whether donations change voting behavior or simply reflect common interests between donor and recipient. Many judicial decisions defy any connection to contributions.

The California Supreme Court, for instance, issued a unanimous decision in February that blocked an asbestos injury lawsuit filed against a dissolved corporation. It might count as a pro-business ruling, but two of the justices who joined it — Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye and Justice Goodwin Liu — have yet to raise money.

In still other cases, a lawsuit will pit one company against another, so that business both wins and loses. In April, for instance, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in a case where a health care company faced off against the Aetna insurance company. Shepherd said the new study omitted such business-vs.-business cases.