From the Dobbs decision in 2022 to more recent political rulings, the current Supreme Court majority has been increasingly brazen in taking apart the framework of our democracy. As citizens and investors, we survey the big picture, notice the patterns, and take action.
Disclaimer: Adasina’s team includes experts in capital markets who are also social justice leaders. The opinions shared here reflect that perspective. Nothing in this article constitutes legal, tax, or investment advice.
What Is Happening?
Over the past several years, a small faction of well-funded agitators on the extreme-right has engineered a takeover of the judiciary branch of the U.S. government, including a drastic political shift in the makeup of the Supreme Court. With an ultra-conservative supermajority installed, powerful actors seeking to permanently fortify their power have brought cases through the judicial system — including all the way up to the Supreme Court — successfully amassing a growing haul of rulings in their favor.
These rulings foretell disturbing news for our country and for investors.
Individual court rulings have been painful — and shameful [see, for example, The Fearless Fund Court Case: What Happened and Where Do We Go from Here?]. Looking at the past few years of rulings in combination, the pattern appears grim.
The most recent spate of Supreme Court rulings falls into two main categories.
Category #1: Stripping power and autonomy from vulnerable populations
Examples:
- Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) allows municipalities to criminalize homelessness, essentially turning poverty — and the impacts of our country’s lack of a social safety net, including (among other things) the legal persistence of the subminimum wage — into a punishable crime.
- Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP (2024) allows South Carolina to continue to use a racially gerrymandered voting map that reduces the power of Black voters in six of South Carolina’s seven districts.
- Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) allows states to criminalize abortion, removing bodily autonomy, safety, medical care, and privacy from women, girls, trans men, and anyone with a uterus.
Category #2: Destroying checks and balances, separation of powers, and the rule of law
Examples:
- Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) overturns the 1984 decision in Chevron v. NRDC, dismantling our country’s regulatory infrastructure — hobbling the EPA, FDA, and SEC, among other agencies charged with protecting the public interest — and in so doing eliminates the most significant safeguards against corporate corruption and abuse.
- Snyder v. United States (2024) allows gifts and payments (what most people would consider bribes) to be given to politicians so long as the transfer happens after the desired outcome of the gifter is achieved.
- Trump v. United States (2024) allows a President absolute immunity, removing legal constraints from the executive branch.
What Does It Mean?
The first category of rulings makes everyday life more challenging for large populations of people who are already disenfranchised, by criminalizing basic health and survival activities and depriving them of individual freedoms and collective political power. In addition to the direct impacts of these legal changes, the compounding effects cannot be overstated. For example, people experiencing homelessness may now face imprisonment and fines; a criminal record can make securing employment even more difficult for them, perpetuating and deepening the poverty trap, which destabilizes social, economic, and financial conditions.
The second category of rulings enables people who already have power to break laws and consolidate power and wealth with impunity. This is cyclical as well. Legalizing bribery and exemptions from civil regulation or criminal prosecution allows people with privilege and political means to unduly influence laws and government officials, creating more legal loopholes and entitlements to amass even more wealth and power, and making some individuals exempt from the law. This even further destabilizes social, economic, and financial conditions.
Both categories present grave material concerns to investors. For impact investors working to create a safer, healthier, more prosperous future, these rulings present severe setbacks and steep new roadblocks. For traditional investors simply trying to make informed assessments of risk, value, and opportunity, these rulings throw all disclosure and regulatory expectations into question, spawn entire classes of unpriced costs with varying opacity and unknowable consequences, and create alarming uncertainty.
Perspective: Rachel J. Robasciotti  | Perspective: Julianne Zimmerman  |
When Maya Philipson and I founded Adasina, we chose to focus our Social Justice Investing efforts on the public markets. Allow me to share more about why we made that choice. During periods of weakened civic and social structures, like the period the U.S. currently finds itself in, the last bastions of defense tend to be the persistent systems through which influential people retain their power. | These rulings are not benign. |
In the current election cycle and beyond, and for the tenure of the current Supreme Court majority, we expect more of the same, and even further shifting of power from government and citizenry to corporations and extremely privileged individuals.
It is understandable to feel moments of dismay, horror, or despair in response to this rejection of our nation’s best and highest founding principles, but we can’t stay there.
This is the time to show up collectively. For ourselves and each other, for justice in the markets and society, and for our hope for the future. As Benjamin Franklin famously quipped in adding his signature to the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
People who value the rule of law, human rights, and a healthy planet vastly outnumber those who wish to hoard power and wealth regardless of the social wreckage, human suffering, and environmental desolation they cause. As citizens, we have a civic obligation to hold our government accountable to its duty to serve all of the people, not just a few.
What Can Investors Do?
As investors, we have a prerogative to affirm and exercise our rights in the financial markets.
A free and fair market is contingent on equal access to information and enforcement of regulations. In the wake of Supreme Court and lower court decisions eliminating meaningful legal checks on corporate corruption and extraction, and enabling both corporations and government officials to game the system for their own purposes, we can no longer assume equal access to information and enforcement. The burden now falls to investors to ensure corporations act responsibly in our long-term best interests.
So invest wisely.
Invest with Adasina, and with other asset managers who understand the critical role that investors play in demanding transparency and holding corporations to account, now that the government has been hobbled in its ability to perform that role. The more capital justice- and sustainability-focused asset managers control, the greater our collective influence to challenge those hoarding power for their own ends rather than creating value for their shareholders and stakeholders. We must collectively hold significant market share to protect the many from the abuses of the few and invest in a sustainable and prosperous future for all.