They just ruled that companies can use arbitration clauses to require that each claim be settled individually, making it impossible for companies to be meaningfully punished for cheating large numbers of customers a few bucks at a time.

Unsurprisingly, it was AT&T that was cheating its customers, to the tune of $30 a pop, that was the defendant in this case.

I’m with Breyer on this:

But the dissenters said a practical ban on class action would be unfair to cheated consumers. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the California courts had insisted on permitting class-action claims, despite arbitration clauses that forbade them. Otherwise, he said, it would allow a company to “insulate” itself “from liability for its own frauds by deliberately cheating large numbers of consumers out of individually small sums of money.”

But I would have been more frank. I would have said that the Scalia, et al, were creating a license to steal.