Last June, the Supreme Court tossed out a class action lawsuit brought by over a million Walmart employees alleging that the company systematically discriminates against women. The Court did not allow the women to try to prove that such discrimination exists, instead holding that the women did not have enough in common with each other to come together in one lawsuit. Yesterday, the women responded to this setback with the first of several cases breaking them down into smaller groups:

The lawyers promised an “armada” of other lawsuits in the next six months making discrimination claims in other regions of the country, as opposed to nationwide. “The case we are starting today is the first of many,” said Brad Seligman, one of the lead plaintiff lawyers. He added that the new lawsuits are “what we like to call Wal-Mart 2.0.” [...]

The lawsuit filed Thursday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California contends that Wal-Mart’s discriminatory practices on pay and job promotion affected more than 90,000 women currently or formerly employed at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores in four regions in California and neighboring states.

This tactic could ultimately prove successful, and it is possible that many hundreds of thousands of women could receive long overdue justice by joining together in somewhat smaller groups. Even if they win, however, the sad truth is that this victory could probably never be repeated thanks to an enormous gift the Supreme Court gave powerful corporations last April.

When the Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart case was handed down, ThinkProgress called it only “the second worst class action case this Supreme Court term.” The worst decision — indeed, one of the very worst Supreme Court decisions in the last decade — was AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. Concepcion built off a long line of misguided decisions allowing corporations to force their consumers and workers to sign away their right to sue the company in a real court and shunt any disputes into a secretive, privatized arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporate parties. Under Concepcion, corporations can not only take away your right to hold them accountable in a real court, they can also take away your right to join together with other victims of the corporation’s lawbreaking to form a class action lawsuit.

Thanks to this deeply erroneous decision, Walmart can now force each and every one of their workers to sign away their rights or they are fired. And without the ability to bring class actions in the future, many of these workers will be completely powerless against their megacorporate employer.

The class action one of the very few tools enabling vulnerable Americans to stand up to a wealthy and influential corporation. If a major corporation cheats a thousand of its workers out of a thousand dollars each, for example, very few of them will decide it is worth the hassle and expense of a major lawsuit and virtually no lawyer will be willing to take such a low dollar case on a contingency fee basis — meaning that the plaintiffs will have to pay more for legal counsel than they are likely to win in the end. If these thousand workers are able to join together into a class action, however, their million dollar claim suddenly becomes very attractive to top litigators — and the hassle of litigation will be virtually non-existent for most of the plaintiffs. Thanks to Concepcion, however, that is probably no longer an option.

Concepcion was an earthquake, and it shook one of the foundations of our civil justice system to the ground. Walmart may still be held accountable for its past actions, but it is doubtful that any of its workers will ever be able to join a class action against them again.

On Monday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to clean elections by invalidating a crucial component of Arizona’s public campaign law. In a 5-4 decision, the Court declared that the trigger portion of the law violations the Constitution. The trigger allows candidates to access additional public funds if their opponent overwhelms them with attack ads and other campaign expenditures. Without the trigger, almost any candidate hoping to compete will be forced into a vicious cycle of raising money from special interests and corporate donors.

The decision, a “hard uppercut following Citizens United‘s body blow to American democracy,” did not happen in a vacuum. According to Politico, the case was “brought by a pair of small-government groups — the Washington-based Institute for Justice and the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute — on behalf of Arizona state candidates who rejected public funds and argued the provision infringed on their freedom of speech.” These two litigation groups share one thing in common: both are heavily financed by right-wing corporate money, particularly from Koch Industries and Walmart:

– Institute for Justice: Founded with “initial seed money” from Charles Koch, the Institute for Justice is a nonprofit litigation group focused on bringing cases to decrease regulations on corporations and to remove clean election laws. Foundations connected to Koch Industries have given the Institute for Justice well over $2.6 million. The Walton Family Foundation, a foundation run by the three children of Walmart founder Sam Walton who have a controlling stake in the company, has donated $1.64 million, and is one of the Institute’s other top donors. Recent 990 disclosures from the group showcase amicus briefs filed in the Citizens United and the Arizona clean election case as top priorities for the Institute.

– The Goldwater Institute: The Goldwater Institute is one of the premiere right-wing think tanks on the state level. Most recently, the group has taken a leading role in challenging the constitutionality of health reform. The Goldwater Institute is funded by a number of conservative foundations. However, both the Walton Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation are among its top donors.

Of course, the disclosed foundation funds noted here may only be a fraction of the money received by the Institute for Justice and the Goldwater Institute. Both organizations accept secret donations from individuals and corporations.

As the courts dismantle decades of campaign finance reform, it is important to remember that a small cabal of well-heeled corporate interests are guiding the way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Koch Industries, Walmart, and a number of other highly political corporate actors paved the way for the decision yesterday by funding the groups responsible for bringing the challenge. And as ThinkProgress has reported, the chamber and Koch have been at the forefront at exploiting the new Wild West of unmitigated corporate electioneering.

No one has benefited more from George W. Bush’s opportunity to appoint two Supreme Court justices than major corporations. In the first five years of the Roberts Court, the Chamber of Commerce’s win rate spiked 15 percent, and one of the Chamber’s top Supreme Court litigators admitted that “[e]xcept for the solicitor general representing the United States, no single entity has more influence on what cases the Supreme Court decides and how it decides them than the National Chamber Litigation Center.”

The Court’s profound empathy for corporate America’s concerns is unfortunate in no small part because wealthy and influential corporations already arrive in court with profound advantages. Wealthy companies hire elite attorneys — and they can hire armies of them — easily outgunning the solo practitioners and small-firm plaintiffs attorneys that most litigants depend on to assert their rights in court. Moreover, because big corporations are frequent litigants, they can act strategically — settling cases that are likely to produce precedents that hurt their bottom line while pressing forward with cases that will shift the law in their direction.

Historically, the law provided several mechanisms designed to level the playing field between Goliath corporations and David plaintiffs, and one of the most important is the class action. Class actions enable many individuals with similar legal claims to join together into a single lawsuit, and it is one of the most important mechanisms to ensure that relatively small dollar claims are actually vindicated in court. If a major corporation cheats a thousand of its workers out of a thousand dollars each, very few of them will decide it is worth the hassle and expense of a major lawsuit, and virtually no lawyer will be willing to take such a low dollar case on a contingency fee basis — meaning that the plaintiffs will have to pay more for legal counsel than they are likely to win in the end. If these thousand workers are able to join together into a class action, however, their million dollar claim suddenly becomes very attractive to top litigators — and the hassle of litigation will be virtually non-existent for most of the plaintiffs.

The single most significant development this term is a pair of 5-4 decisions that will effectively eliminate millions of consumers and workers ability to bring class actions in the future.

The more famous of these cases is also the less important of the two. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Court’s five conservatives stripped more than one million women Walmart employees of their ability to bring a class action alleging systematic gender discrimination, despite widespread evidence that women were treated less favorably then men. As Justice Ginsburg explained in her partial dissent, “[w]omen fill 70 percent of the hourly jobs in the retailer’s stores but make up only ’33 percent of management employees,’” and “the higher one looks in the organization the lower the percentage of women.” (Justice Ginsburg also agreed with the majority that the women could not receive all of the remedies they sought in the court below, but her opinion clearly dissents from the core of the majority’s holding.)

The impact of Wal-Mart, despite the enormous class of women affected by it, will ultimately pale in comparison to the impact of another, much less famous case. In its 5-4 decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the Court permitted corporations to refuse to do business with anyone who does not 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. Likewise, cell phone companies, banks, credit card companies, nursing homes — indeed, anyone who requires you to sign an agreement before they will do business with you — can completely immunize themselves from class actions simply by adding a few magic words to the agreement.

Sadly, this assault on class actions is part of a much broader effort to tilt the legal playing field even further in favor of the wealthy and the powerful. Historically, the courts used punitive damages to drive up the cost of lawbreaking when ordinary remedies aren’t enough to make a company cease its illegal actions. Beginning in 1996, however, the Supreme Court started imposing constitutional limits on punitives. Moreover, the Supreme Court wholeheartedly embraces an abusive practice known as “forced arbitration,” allowing corporations to force their consumers, workers, and patients to sign away their right to sue the company in a real court — and shunting them into a privatized, corporate-owned arbitration system.

The upshot of all of these decisions is that it matters less and less what laws elected officials enact to protect ordinary Americans. Without class actions, punitive damages, access to real courts and other essential protections, many consumers and workers will be unable to actually enforce these laws.