This is the first in a series of semi-live bog posts on the Santa Clara Law Review symposium on “Big Business and the Roberts Court: Explaining the Court’s Receptiveness to Business Interests.” The morning opened with welcoming remarks from Santa Clara University School of Law Dean Donald Polden. After a warm welcome to the participants and attendees, Dean Polden suggested that in just a few short years the Roberts Court has worked significant changes in certain areas of law important to business. In antitrust, for instance, he suggested the Roberts Court has “dismantled” the architecture of the law through a series of pro-defendant decisions. What causes this? He speculated that there was several possibilities, ranging from the power of corporate money to fund high-powered litigation, the gradual “re-education” of judges and lawyers by the likes of the Olin Foundation, or perhaps just a general change in public opinion or elite consensus.
The first panel consisted of practitioners engaged in Supreme Court litigation: Robin Conrad of the National Chamber Litigation Center (the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), Brian Wolfman of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, and Sri Srinivasan of O