SCOTUS May Grapple With Defining ‘Class’

Before the end of the term, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear a case that gets at the heart of what qualifies a “class.” There are four potential cases the Court could take up, which address questions of whether a class full of uninjured members may be certified, and whether plaintiffs may gloss over individual differences among class members using experts and statistics. Previous Supreme Court rulings in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes and Comcast Corp. v. Behrend found that class members must be shown to have “suffered the same injury,” and disapproved of “trials by formula,” respectively. But those rulings have been interpreted differently in lower courts, leading to the several cases asking for further clarity on class certification. Mayer Brown attorneys Tim Bishop and Chad Clamage review the cases, and note that, “The cert petitions in these cases present the Court with an extraordinary opportunity to review class-certification orders in cases with fully developed trial records, one that may not come around again given the behavior of many lower courts now.”