Today the Supreme Court ruled in Comcast Corp. v. Behrens that an antitrust class action was improperly certified because Justice Scalia and four other Justices found the plaintiffs' damage theory inadequately supported by expert testimony. Others will no doubt have more to say on this, but I found the majority opinion transparently result-oriented, and disturbing […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
Richard D. Freer of Emory has written The Supreme Court and the Class Action: Where We Are and Where We Might Be Going. Here's the abstract: In 2010 and 2011, the Supreme Court decided five class action cases. In 2012, it has agreed to hear four more. This piece summarizes what the Court has done […]
Shay Lavie of Harvard has written The Malleability of Collective Litigation, forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review. Here is the abstract: In Wal-Mart v. Dukes (131 S.Ct. 2541 [2011]), Wal-Mart avoided class action because employment decisions were made by local supervisors. However, it was Wal-Mart who chose to delegate discretion; by doing so, it […]
by Greg Beck The Ninth Circuit today upheld a district court’s decision approving a class-action settlement against Facebook over the company’s long-defunct “Beacon” program—one of the first of what turned out to be a long string of privacy fiascos for the social media company. With Beacon, Facebook teamed up with Blockbuster to post users’ video […]
Myriam E. Gilles of Cardozo has written Killing Them with Kindness: ‘Consumer-Friendly’ Arbitration Clauses after AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, forthcoming in Notre Dame Law Review. Herer’s the abstract: In AT&T v. Concepcion, the Supreme Court struck California’s so-called “Discover Bank rule” – a judge-made rule providing that arbitration agreements attended by class action waivers are […]