'Really big': Supreme Court ruling against Norfolk Southern seen as rebuke to corporate impunity

Opponents of unmitigated corporate power celebrated Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Norfolk Southern's attempt to limit where companies can be sued. In a 5-4 opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonja Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the high court ruled that Pennsylvania's "consent-by-registration" law "requiring an out-of-state firm to answer in the commonwealth any suits against it in exchange for status as a registered foreign corporation and the benefits that entails" does not violate the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Although he had never worked in Pennsylvania, Mallory filed his lawsuit in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas because his attorneys were from the state and "he thought he would get the fairest access to justice there," Ashley Keller, the lawyer representing him before the U.S. Supreme Court, toldThe Lever in February. Norfolk Southern asked the U.S. Supreme Court "to uphold the lower court ruling, overturn Pennsylvania's law, and restrict where corporations can be sued, upending centuries of precedent," the journalists noted. As Bloomberg Lawreported Tuesday, "Alito seemed to invite a future challenge against the law in his concurrence," where he suggested that "Norfolk Southern could win when the case goes back to the lower court."