Yesterday, a federal judge heard arguments in the legal challenge brought against Georgia’s new immigration law by advocacy and civil rights groups. The plaintiffs in the case argue that the law — modeled after Arizona’s immigration legislation — is federally preempted, would promote racial profiling, and violate the Fourth Amendment. Those aren’t the only problems with Georgia’s new immigration policy.

Several taxi companies and more than 2,000 cab drivers have filed their own lawsuit against the law. Their grievance has to do with a specific provision which would make it a misdemeanor to transport fewer than seven undocumented immigrants and a felony to drive any more than that. The cab drivers claim that this would burden them with the responsibility of checking the immigration status of each and every one of their passengers. (Not to mention the potential invasion of privacy that the law would inflict on their customers). The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:

On Monday, an Atlanta attorney Quinton Washington of the law firm Bell & Washington LLC, WXIA reporter Jeff Hullinger there are unintended consequences of the law that could affect passengers. Washington said if a cab or limo drivers is pulled over for speeding, or for a broken taillight, police have the right to ask for proof of citizenship of passengers. [...]

A concern is that many immigrants use cabs to buy groceries and run other errands, and cab drivers don’t want to be responsible for asking all of them for documentation paperwork.

“It is our hope that the legislature and local law enforcement authorities would not seek to penalize drivers for simply taking people from point A to point B,” stated Washington.

The attorney in the suit also noted that the immigration law doesn’t just raise legal issues for the taxi cab industry, it also carries implications for public transportation workers and other transportation companies. “Right now MARTA could be fined under this,” Washington said. “They don’t have a common carrier exception for buses and MARTA, etc. They only have exceptions for people transporting known undocumented persons if they are going to judicial proceedings and told to do so by the courts.”

Along similar lines, during yesterday’s hearing, the federal judge also questioned whether U.S. citizens should be prosecuted for driving their undocumented immigrant parents to the grocery store. The judge indicated that he will issue his decision on whether to enjoin the law before July 1, when it is scheduled to take effect.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes is a huge blow to the more than 1 million women who alleged rampant and systematic gender discrimination against the retail giant. The court’s decision will still allow each of the individual women to bring their own case against Walmart, but they will not be able to join together in a class action. For this reason, thousands of these workers will decide that their case isn’t worth the multi-year hassle of an individual lawsuit. Thousands more will discover that they cannot afford to hire an attorney to bring their case. And thousands more on top of that will be forced to hire attorneys who are far less equipped to take on a major corporation than the elite legal team attracted by a large class action.

Nevertheless, Wal-Mart is only the second-biggest blow the Supreme Court dealt to workers, consumers and other people who need class actions to vindicate their rights during its current term.

Two months ago, the Court handed down a 5-4 decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion , permitting corporations to refuse to do business with anyone who refuses to sign away their right to bring a class action lawsuit. As a result of this decision, Walmart need never worry about a class action again — they can simply tell all of their workers to sign away their rights or they’re fired.

Nor is Walmart alone in being able to take advantage of Concepcion. Cell phone companies, credit card companies, banks, and even nursing homes have all used similar traps to force their consumers into a privatized arbitration system that overwhelmingly favors corporate parties. After Concepcion, they can all just add a “no class action” clause to those contracts and usher in an era where consumer and worker class actions are a thing of the past.

In 2001, a conservative, corporate-aligned think tank called the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) gave Justice Clarence Thomas the gift of a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln. At the ceremony presenting Thomas with this very expensive gift, AEI president Christopher DeMuth explained that the bust was “cast in 1914 by the great neo-classical sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman.” Watch it:

AEI, however, is not simply in the business of giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices — it is also in the business of litigating before the United States Supreme Court. ThinkProgress uncovered three briefs that AEI filed in Thomas’ Court after Thomas received their $15,000 gift. Thomas recused from none of these three cases, and he either voted in favor of the result AEI favored or took a stance that was even further to the right in each case:

• Riley v. Kennedy : AEI filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision preventing a change in Alabama’s voting law from going into effect. Justice Thomas did not recuse, and he joined the Supreme Court’s decision reversing the lower court.

• Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 : AEI filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decisionupholding a local school district’s desegregation plan. Thomas joined the majority opinion reversing the lower court’s decision, and he filed a lengthy concurrence defending that result.

• Whitman v. American Trucking Association: AEI joined a brief asking the Supreme Court to allow the EPA to consider the costs of implementing new air quality standards before it issued them. Thomas’ concurring opinion went much further than AEI asked him to go, suggesting that the law authorizing EPA to issue these standards is unconstitutional.

Although there is no evidence that AEI gave Thomas the $15,000 gift specifically to buy his vote in a particular case, Thomas’ decision to sit on cases where his benefactor has a demonstrated interest creates a very serious appearance of impropriety. No one would trust a judge to hear their case if they learned that someone on the other side of the case had given that judge a rare and expensive gift.