ON JANUARY 11th Rebecca Friedrichs, a California teacher challenging the way public-sector unions do business, bounded out of the Supreme Court wearing a big smile. Ms Friedrichs’s lawyer, Michael Carvin, had just argued her case in front of nine justices, five of whom gave her complaint a warm reception. But whilst Mr Carvin and Ms Friedrichs were celebrating beside the fountain on the Supreme Court plaza, they had no inkling that one of the expected votes in their favour would disappear with Antonin Scalia’s death in February, or that a court split down the middle would thwart their long-sought victory a month later.
It takes a majority of justices to overturn a lower-court ruling. So on March 29th, when the now eight-member Supreme Court released a terse, one-sentence decision in Friedrichs v California Teachers Association, it made all the difference that the ninth circuit court of appeals had turned back the challenge to the unions when it considered Ms Friedrichs’s case last year. That decision, the justices wrote in an unsigned ruling, “is affirmed by an equally divided court”. A near-certain blow to teachers, police and firemen’s unions in about half the country was averted by a vote of 4-4.
Ms Friedrichs’s target was a nearly four-decade precedent upholding state laws that allow unions to collect...Continue reading
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