by Deepak Gupta We've already blogged here quite a bit in the past few days about our rehearing petition in the Third Circuit class-action case of Carrerra v. Bayer — including this post on a recent column by Alison Frankel of Reuters. Today, Frankel has a new story about the case. This time, she writes about the […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
by Deepak Gupta Legal reporter Alison Frankel of Reuters has a new column highlighting the effort to seek full-court rehearing of the Third Circuit's troubling decision in Carrera v. Bayer, which holds that plaintiffs must show, before they can certify a class, how they will identify and prove the class membership of consumers who purchased the defendant's product. […]
Alexandra D. Lahav of Connecticut has written Symmetry and Class Action Litigation, 60 U.C.L.A.L. Rev.(2013). Here's the abstract: In ordinary litigation, parties often have different resources to devote to their lawsuit. This is a problem because the adversarial system is predicated on two (or more) parties, equal and opposite one another, making their best arguments […]
by Paul Bland, Senior Attorney, Public Justice, Of Counsel, Chavez & Gertler On Twitter @PblandBland In Kennedy v. Wells Fargo, Judge King of the Southern District of Florida enforced another arbitration clause that tosses out consumer claims in the multi district litigation involving checking overdraft claims. The plaintiffs had several arguments that the particular arbitration clause at […]
I'm presenting at a few CLE programs over the next few days and I thought readers of the blog might be interested. The first can be accessed via phone; the other two will be at the American Association of Justice's Annual Convention in San Francisco: A one-hour phone briefing on American Express v. Italian Colors: Practical Implications […]
Here. The story is about how car makers are using arbitration clauses to defeat consumer protections, including state lemon laws, and keep defects secret.
In February, the brokerage firm Charles Schwab won a ruling from a hearing panel of FINRA, the financial industry regulatory authority, invalidating FINRA's rule against class-action bans and allowing Schwab to use a class-action ban in its customer agreements. The panel concluded that "the amended language used in Schwab's customer agreements to prohibit participation in […]
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 […]
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 […]