In August 1971, a prominent corporate lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, named Lewis F. Powell Jr. authored a “Confidential Memorandum” to the United States Chamber of Commerce. Powell observed that “with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” He urged the Chamber to replicate game-changing litigation victories by “[l]abor unions, civil rights groups,” and “public interest law firms,” which often came “at business’s expense.” Six years later, with Powell himself having been appointed to the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon, the Chamber created a “voice of business in the courts,” the National Chamber Litigation Center.

Over the past month, the Supreme Court heard three cases that show how radically Powell’s strategy has tilted the law business’s way—more so than he could have imagined, or even favored. Indeed, until he retired in 1987, Justice Powell embraced the Chamber’s position in only 53 percent of its cases he heard, whereas the Chamber has won 69 percent of its cases since John G. Roberts became chief justice in 2005. More significantly, as the Constitutional Accountability Center has reported, in ideologically polarized cases, the five-justice conservative bloc has awarded the Chamber a whopping 80 percent win tally.

This blow-out record has emboldened business advocates to shoot for the moon, throwing precedent and caution aside. In recent years, and specifically in the cases the Court is now mulling, the Chamber and its allies have worked toward carving out what amounts to a law-free zone, effectively immunizing corporations from private lawsuits when they violate virtually any law, state or federal, enacted to protect consumers, employees, minorities, women, retirees, small investors, or small business suppliers.

“[O]ftentimes,” as Senator Patrick Leahy has observed, the conservative bloc has “turn[ed] these laws on their heads, making them protections for big business rather than ordinary citizens.” In doing so, the conservatives have fashioned doctrines that marginalize Congress and aggrandize the Court’s policy-making power. “The exercise of power is largely a zero-sum game,” Linda Greenhouse has warned, “and the court, defining the rules of engagement, … is winning at the expense of Congress.”

The three cases now awaiting decision will test how far the Court’s conservative bloc is willing to ride the Chamber’s campaign to restore, via a new but functionally equivalent suite of rules, the early 20th century constitutional regime that empowered an arch-conservative federal judiciary to trump statutory protections for consumers, workers, and other constituencies. Of the three pending cases, the most audacious, Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, is a constitutional challenge to a Fair Credit Reporting Act provision, added to the original 1970 Act in 1996 after extensive hearings on the industry’s uneven fact-checking practices. This law authorizes consumers to sue credit reporting agencies, including internet-era data aggregators like defendant Spokeo, for damages up to $1,000, when such an agency disseminates false information about them. Given the importance of a strong credit rating for procuring everything from an apartment to a cell phone to a job, empowering individuals in this way is crucially important.