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The Supreme Court spent the end of 2011 setting up a blockbuster docket during the 2012 election season, deciding to take high-profile cases such as challenges to the Affordable Care Act and Arizona's anti-immigration law.
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But the Supremes made headlines in the first half of 2011 with notable decisions on speech, corporate personhood, and the ability of consumers and employees to take on major companies.
Here is the International Business Times' round up of the top five Supreme Court decisions of the year to tide court watchers over until 2012.
Dukes v. Wal-Mart
This 5-4 decision in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart sex discrimination suit against the largest private employer in the U.S. was a blow to the 1.6 million women who won the right to proceed with their class action.
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The high court in June rejected the female employees' argument that Wal-Mart had a uniform corporate culture that permitted bias against women by giving discretion to thousands of managers on making promotion and pay decisions.
The decision dismantled the nationwide class, finding that there was no commonality between the female employees scattered throughout America's Wal-Mart-owned stores.
"Merely showing that Wal-Mart's policy of discretion has produced an overall sex-based disparity does not suffice," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion.
The lawyers for the women, however, are back with a slew of new sex discrimination lawsuits that their lawyers say are tailored to address the opinion.
Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T
The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision legitimized the idea of corporate personhood by removing campaign finance restrictions on businesses. But the court March 1 sided with the Federal Communications Commission in objecting to AT&T's claim to corporate personhood.
AT&T had attempted to block the FCC from releasing corporate documents under a Freedom of Information Act request, citing the law's "personal privacy" exemption.
The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, disagreed that the "personal" privacy extended to corporations, who are "persons" in a legal context.
In parsing the word "personal," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote "dictionaries ... suggest that 'personal' does not ordinarily relate to artificial 'persons' such as corporations."
