At Reuters, reporter Alison Frankel has this story on a recent class-action settlement with Verizon. Verizon (as is typical of cellphone companies) requires customers to agree to arbitrate any disputes that may arise. The settlement avoids appellate review of Verizon’s effort to limit arbitrations to batches of 10 at a time, which, in situations where […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
A group of consumers brought a class action against the New York Black Car Operators’ Injury Compensation Fund–a statutorily created fund that provides workers’ compensation benefits to New York’s black car drivers. The consumers argued that the fund had unlawfully collected a surcharge on noncash tips they paid to drivers (generally, through the Uber App), […]
The Eleventh Circuit today weighed in on a matter involving the increasingly frequent scenario of a corporate defendant refusing to comply with the terms of the arbitration agreement it foisted upon consumers. Three consumers who had bought timeshares through Wyndham Vacation Resorts filed claims for breach of contract and fraudulent inducement with the American Arbitration […]
I wrote The FAA Should Not Cover Consumer Claims, to appear in The Federal Arbitration Act: Successes, Failures, and a Roadmap for Reform (Richard A. Bales & Jill I. Gross eds., forthcoming 2024 Cambridge University Press). Here is the abstract: Consumer protection laws face a fundamental enforcement issue: because consumer claims are typically for small […]
If items are always on sale, are they really on sale at all? This is the question underlying the plaintiff’s claim in Hennessey v. The Gap, a case in which an Eighth Circuit decision issued yesterday, affirming the dismissal of a consumer class action. The named plaintiff sued the Gap and Old Navy, alleging that sale […]
Corporate defendants have long pretended that their interests in mandatory, individual arbitration clauses are directed at the fact that arbitration provides an efficient, adequate forum for consumers to vindicate their claims for relief– not in effectively blocking consumers from obtaining any meaningful relief. As more and more plaintiffs have been taking such defendants at their […]
Jamie Huber brought a putative class action under the FDCPA, alleging that confusing collection letters she received from Simon’s Agency, Inc. were misleading and deceptive. A district court certified a class, and granted summary judgment in its favor. In so doing, it found that Ms. Huber had standing based on an informational injury, and that […]
Last week, the Fourth Circuit decided In re Marriott International, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation, in which it vacated a district court’s class certification order. The district court had granted certification before addressing the merits of Marriott’s argument that the plaintiffs were barred from proceeding as a class under a waiver. While acknowledging “it […]
Last Thursday, the Second Circuit agreed with an objector, and vacated a district court’s approval of a class action settlement of claims relating to automatic renewals of New York Times subscriptions, in a thorough decision that clarifies the circuit standard as to several Rule 23(e) issues. The court held that the 2018 Amendments to Rule […]
Rule 23(f) authorizes interlocutory review of orders granting or denying class-action certification, so long as a petition is filed within 14 days of such an order. But what if, instead of filing a 23(f) petition, a party files a motion for reconsideration, and the court modifies its certification order? Does the 14-day clock start anew? […]