And if we want to be coherent in complaining that we have a president who has no respect for the Constitution,

then we have to take seriously the design of that Constitution.

It's not designed to remove a president just because we become terribly

unhappy with his values.

Hi, and welcome to Anicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the Supreme Court, and the rule of law.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover many, if not most of those things for Slate.

And this week, the Supreme Court handed down a very big deal of a ruling in an employee rights case, Epic Systems Corp v. Lewis.

In its five to four decision, delivered Monday and authored by Neil Gorsuch, the majority ruled that companies can use the arbitration clauses in employment contracts to bar their workers from banding together to take legal actions over all sorts of workplace issues, including wage theft, sexual harassment, or discrimination based on race, gender, and religion.

Now, Justice Gorsuch rooted his decision for the majority in a very narrow reading of the Federal

Arbitration Act. The practical effect of this ruling will just be to make it harder for workers

to get out from under their mandatory arbitration clauses. And these are relatively new arrangements

in 1992, only about 2% of non-unionized employers in the U.S.

used these clauses. Today, more than half of them do. This week's ruling could affect some 25 million employment contracts nationwide.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for herself and the court's liberal wing,

wrote in her dissent that Gorsuch's analysis was, quote, egregiously wrong. She noted that

employees' rights to band together to meet their employer's superior strength would be worth precious

little if employers could condition employment on workers signing away those rights.

Now, to the extent that this confirms the sense that the newest justice is going to be unlikely to side with workers against their bosses going forward, this case is not surprising.

This may also telegraph where the Roberts Court is headed on the other blockbuster labor case of the term, Janice,

that was argued in February and covered in some depth on this show.

We'll have more on Janice and the other cases that are going to start tumbling from the skies in the coming weeks as the decisions come down.

We wanted to turn today to a topic that seems to be generating an

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