Right-wing legal groups and pro-business trade associations are pressuring the Supreme Court to further gut consumer protections this session by making it harder to sue companies when they fail to disclose business failures. The organizations behind the pressure campaign helped deliver the high court’s conservative majority that will hear the cases in question — and one of their donors may have financial interests in the cases’ outcomes.
Ahead of the upcoming Supreme Court session that begins on November 4, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Legal Foundation have filed amicus briefs in cases involving technology company Nvidia and social media giant Facebook, urging the high court to use the cases to gut consumer protections and shareholder rights. A similarly aligned group, the Atlantic Legal Foundation, filed a similar brief in the Nvidia case.
These cases come after the Supreme Court dramatically diminished consumer and environmental protections during their last session.
In both of the upcoming cases, shareholders sued the tech companies because they allegedly failed to disclose key financial risks in their annual disclosure forms. In the Nvidia case, investors say the company failed to disclose that a core segment of its clientele were cryptocurrency miners, a potential financial risk to investors due to the crypto market’s volatility.
In a separate case, shareholders accused Facebook of failing to properly disclose information related to a 2018 scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm that used Facebook data to create voter profiles for the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign without the consent of Facebook’s users.
According to the briefs, if the shareholders are successful, it…
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Auteur: Freddy Brewster
