On Tuesday, another group of plaintiffs suing together lost their case against a corporation. This time, it was workers. Two weeks ago, it was consumers. In both decisions, the same five-justice majority supported their decisions to whittle away corporate accountability mechanisms with procedural rationales that were so results-oriented as to seem nonsensical to the four dissenting justices and other court-watchers.

The latest case, Genesis HealthCare Corp. v. Symczyk, involved health care workers who claimed they were being docked pay for a 30-minute lunch break even when they worked. In what is known as a “collective action” (similar to a class action), one worker files a claim under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and others who are similarly situated later join on to seek a complete resolution to the issue.

So here’s what Genesis did. It offered the first representative plaintiff $7,500 to settle her claim and gave her ten days to respond. Laura Symczyk never responded, presuming the case would continue on. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Genesis successfully argued that Symczyk’s case became moot when she rejected the offer, because the sum of money would have resolved her case in its entirety and she no longer had any claim before the court.

Of course, as Justice Elena Kagan so pointedly makes clear in her dissent, it isn’t true that an unaccepted settlement offer ends a case. “As every first-year law student learns, the recipient’s rejection of an offer ‘leaves the matter as if no offer had ever been made,’” she writes. But somehow, several lower courts accepted the defendants’ argument that the offer mooted Symczyk’s individual case, and plaintiffs conceded the point. And because plaintiffs didn’t appeal on that issue, the majority accepts a conclusion that, as Justice Kagan writes, “the facts will show to be ridiculous” and “ensures it will reach the wrong decision.” In fact, according to Kagan and her fellow dissenters, not only is the majority wrong in this case; there is no way that a settlement offer could ever moot a case. So that’s that. This case would have no applicability to any other case, leading Justice Kagan to advise, ”Feel free to relegate the majority’s decision to the furthest reaches of your mind: The situation it addresses should never again arise.”

But let’s assume for a moment that a situation could arise, since that’s the basis of a new U.S. Supreme Court precedent (and dissents, while useful, are not binding precedent). Assume that, instead of Symczyk rejecting the settlement, she had accepted a settlement at the paltry price of $7,500, intending to resolve her own claim but not the claims of others. Or perhaps more likely, assume that another court, guided by the majority opinion’s silence and not the dissent, disagrees with Justice Kagan and decides that a rejected offer can moot an entire collective case. If courts interpret this to mean that all other workers no longer have a claim, corporations can dispense with every collective action against them simply by buying off just one worker at an astronomically lower price than litigating or settling with all the workers. And it’s possible courts could also apply this to the other mechanism that enables plaintiffs to band together, the class action.

The irony here is that collective and class action mechanisms exist because it costs too much and is too inefficient for any one consumer or worker to challenge a company-wide policy. So individuals can’t challenge a policy alone, but corporations can dispense with their collective lawsuit, by resolving the claim with just one person. Another example of the Roberts Court’s brand of access to justice.

What started out as a case about whether corporations could be held accountable in U.S. courts for human rights abuses against foreigners abroad turned into a case about whether anyone can be held accountable. And on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the answer is, mostly, no.

In a sweeping holding, Chief Justice John Roberts led a splintered court in ruling that several Nigerians alleging an oil company aided an abetted torture, arbitrary killings, and indefinite detention could not sue, because the corporate conduct occurred outside the United States. Roberts reasoned that what is known as the “presumption against extraterritoriality” applies to a 200-year-old statute that authorizes civil lawsuits by “aliens” for “violations of the law of nations,” meaning courts should err against enforcing a law intended to punish egregious foreign conduct in the frequent instances when that conduct takes place in a foreign country.

“[T]here is no indication that the ATS was passed to make the United States a uniquely hospitable forum for the enforcement of international norms,” Justice Roberts wrote for the majority in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum.

Roberts’ conclusion is rebutted by the very conduct the Alien Tort Statute was designed to prevent. Piracy was one of the primary torts targeted by Congress at the time of ATS’ passage – conduct that inherently takes place on the high seas. Justice Stephen Breyer explains in a four-justice concurring opinion that would decide the case on significantly narrower grounds:

As I have indicated, we should treat this Nation’s interest in not becoming a safe harbor for violators of the most fundamental international norms as an important jurisdiction related interest justifying application of the ATS in light of the statute’s basic purposes—in particular that of compensating those who have suffered harm at the hands of, e.g., torturers or other modern pirates. Nothing in the statute or its history suggests that our courts should turn a blind eye to the plight of victims in that “handful of heinous actions.”

Now, that handful of heinous actions will have to find remedy elsewhere. This decision not only means that Nigerians cannot sue foreign corporations for their conduct abroad. On this particular point, the four-justice Breyer concurrence agreed that this case did not pass muster. Roberts’ sweeping pronouncement against extraterritoriality may also mean that foreign nationals subject to abuse, for example, at the hands of a U.S. corporation that houses its factories in places whose laws shield it from liability, or an American citizen who commits human rights violations abroad against foreigners, also could not be subject to suit in the United States.

In two recent federal appeals court decisions, lawsuits that challenged torture abroad by two foreign actors were allowed to proceed in U.S. courts because the defendants had lived or were living in the United States. As Justice Breyer points out, Congress is aware that the ATS is the basis for these sorts of lawsuits, and has not sought to amend the act in any way – likely because they recognize that the act was intended to target foreign conduct that is otherwise difficult to reach. But that did not stop the Roberts majority from inferring the narrowest possible congressional intent.

The scope of the opinion will not become clear until it is interpreted by courts. Extraterritoriality is a legal concept that asks not just whether conduct took place abroad, but also whether the claims “touch and concern the territory of the United States” such that a plaintiff can overcome the presumption against them. The only hint the court gives is that lawsuits against corporations will face a particularly heavy burden, noting, “Corporations are often present in many countries, and it would reach too far to say that mere corporate presence suffices.”

What is clear is that the presumption is exceedingly difficult to overcome, and that both individuals and corporations have a high chance of skirting liability simply by doing their dirty work elsewhere.

On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is scheduled to hold a confirmation hearing for Tom Perez, the current Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and President Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Labor. As if on cue, four of the Obama Administration’s perpetual gadflies — Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Patrick McHenry (R-NC) & Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — released a report yesterday with the breathless title “DOJ’s Quid Pro Quo with St. Paul: How Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez Manipulated Justice and Ignored the Rule of Law.” The report accuses Perez of brokering a “quid pro quo” deal where DOJ agreed to keep out of a potential fraud lawsuit against the city of St. Paul if St. Paul agreed to withdraw a civil rights case that was pending before the Supreme Court. Here’s what actually happened:

1. Perez’s Actions Likely Saved A Key Prong Of Federal Fair Housing Law

The federal Fair Housing Act forbids most landlords, realtors, mortgage lenders and other people involved in selling or renting housing from engaging in racial, gender, religious or several other forms of discrimination. Like all discrimination cases, however, these lawsuits are notoriously difficult to prove because they turn upon the secret reasons why banks and property owners decide to deal with certain people and not others. There’s nothing illegal about renting to a white couple when a black couple also wanted the same unit, or about denying a home loan to a woman or a minority — unless, of course, the decision not to rent to the black couple or to deny the loan was made because of their gender or minority status.

For this reason, civil rights law provides several mechanisms that allow victims of discrimination to pursue cases without first having to develop a talent for mind-reading. One of the most important of these mechanisms is “disparate impact” lawsuits, which allow a court to infer discrimination if an renter or lender’s policies consistently lead to women or minorities winding up with the short end of the stick. Thus, for example, Perez’s Civil Rights Division won a $335 million settlement from the mortgage lender Countrywide, after it discovered that Countrywide “charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers across the country than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk.” In one year, for example, “Countrywide employees charged Hispanic applicants in Los Angeles an average of $545 more in fees for a $200,000 loan than they charged non-Hispanic white applicants with similar credit histories.” DOJ was able to use this pattern of discrimination to win this settlement, thanks to the concept of disparate impact, even though they never uncovered a smoking gun document where Countrywide’s senior management openly confessed to racial discrimination.

While the Supreme Court has never considered whether disparate impact suits are permitted under the Fair Housing Act, all nine of the federal appeals courts to consider the question held that they are. Chief Justice Roberts, however, crusaded against these kinds of lawsuits for more than 30 years, and when an unusually weak Fair Housing claim reached the Supreme Court in 2011, many court observers feared that the conservative justices would use it an opportunity to gut the Fair Housing Act and forbid disparate impact housing suits. Perez helped convince the city of St. Paul, which brought that very weak case to the Supreme Court’s attention, to withdraw its appeal — potentially saving much of federal fair housing law in the process.

2. DOJ’s Leading Expert On Cases Alleging Fraud Against The Federal Government Called For DOJ To Dismiss The Fraud Lawsuit. In His Words, “This Case Sucks.”

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Ten years ago this June, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ ban on “[d]eviate sexual intercourse” in Lawrence v. Texas, declaring in the process that the law may not criminalize non-commercial sexual activity between consenting adults. As Dana Liebelson reports, however, 14 states still have anti-sodomy laws on the books nearly a decade after the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. These include four states — Montana, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas — which specifically outlaw gay sex, in addition to ten other states outlawing oral or anal sex between any two partners. In 2011, Tim Murphy mapped this out:

Last week, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) filed a brief seeking to keep Virginia’s so-called “crimes against nature” law on the books. Although he claims he’s doing so merely to allow prosecutions against adults having sex with children and similar crimes, he had the opportunity to vote for such a narrow and constitutional sex ban when he was a state lawmaker. Instead, he voted to keep Virginia’s broad and unconstitutional ban on the books.

In just the first week since the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a class action lawsuit by more than 2 million Comcast costumers, the decision is already having major repercussions in several other cases alleging malfeasance by major corporations.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court kicked two other class action challenges back to the lower court in light of its ruling in Comcast v. Behrend. In both cases, the plaintiffs had secured hard-fought wins just to establish that they could sue as a class. Now, they will have to argue that threshold question yet again — using the new harsher standard imposed by the Court’s five conservative justices — before they even have a chance to make the case that the defendants are liable. And in another case decided just two days after Comcast, a federal trial judge relied upon the decision to reject several claims of a class suing Applebee’s for wage-and-hour law violations.

In the Comcast ruling issued last Wednesday, five justices sided with Comcast in a significant but little-noticed ruling that denied consumers the opportunity to challenge alleged monopolistic practices and further eviscerated the class action, the mechanism that enables multiple individuals to band together with the necessary resources to take on corporate behemoths. The four dissenting justices who fumed at the audacity of the decision took solace in the fact that it should have limited application to other cases. But early indications are that the decision has legs.

In each of the three cases already affected by the ruling, Comcast was the basis for rejecting rulings in favor of the class and instead siding with the defending companies. In one, a class of consumers alleging particular washing machine models were defective will have to re-litigate the claim that individuals can join the class even if their faulty appliance hasn’t yet developed mold and foul odors. In another, a group of RBS Citizens employees will have to invest even greater resources into merely arguing that they should not have to challenge the company’s widespread denial of overtime pay one case at a time.

The plaintiffs in both of these cases won the right to sue as a class both at trial and before the federal appeals panel. In the appeals court decision ruling against Whirlpool, the court cited Judge Richard Posner, a pioneer of the conservative law and economics movement, who upheld a class lawsuit in a case alleging the exact same washer defect. In that case, he rejected claims that each plaintiff had to prove individual damages at such an early stage in order to certify the class, since plaintiffs must later prove their own damages before they can be compensated. Posner explains:

A class action is the more efficient procedure for determining liability and damages in a case such as this involving a defect that may have imposed costs on tens of thousands of consumers, yet not a cost to any one of them large enough to justify the expense of an individual suit. If necessary, a determination of liability could be followed by individual hearings to determine the damages sustained by each class member . . . The class action procedure would be efficient not only in cost, but also in efficacy, if we are right that the stakes in an individual case would be too small to justify the expense of suing, in which event denial of class certification would preclude any relief.

This is precisely the reason why the class mechanism exists, and why it is such a blow to consumers’ rights, employees’ rights, and corporate accountability, that the Supreme Court is steadily eroding its viability. As Reuters reports, several other lawyers are already citing the decision in major lawsuits against the corporations they represent.