And Clarence Thomas will spend the entirety of the argument...

Quietly saying to himself, "Well, hellooooooo Ladies...." as the Old Spice guy.

When a woman with a master's degree who had worked at Wal-Mart for five years asked her department manager why she was paid less than a 17-year-old boy who had just been hired, she was informed, "You just don't have the right equipment... You aren't male, so you can't expect to be paid the same." Another female employee was informed that a male employee got a bigger raise then she did because he had "a family to support." Another was told that men would always be paid more than women at Wal-Mart because "God made Adam first, so women would always be second to men."

These are galling stories, of course, but were they isolated incidents of individual sexism, or did they represent a pattern of long-standing, systemic behavior across the entire company?

The answer to that question is at the heart of Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the biggest case of the current term of the United States Supreme Court, and which will be argued tomorrow.

Needless to say class-action claims are often necessary to correct corporate practices of discrimination that are wide and sweeping throughout a businesses culture...like this:

Wal-Mart had a far lower percentage of female managers in 2001, when the suit was filed, than their closest competitors had in 1975.

I don't trust Mr. Balls and Strikes or his corporatist court one iota to do either the right...or precedent supported thing. It's all up to you Anthony Kennedy.