- What did the Supreme Court decide in the Wal-Mart case? And more importantly, how did it justify its decision? (HINT: the key word here is “commonality” (and how it related to “class-action lawsuit”). Try to understand what this legal terms means, as it is key to the court’s decision).
“It is true that not all women employed at Wal-Mart since 1998 faced the same degree of discrimination”(1). This statement in the article, “Sex Class Action” by Dayana Tortorici, explains perfectly what happened in the Wal-Mart case. The court decided that because “the 1.5 million female Wal-Mart employees were not all denied the same promotion, the same pay raise, or insulted, belittled, or obstructed by the same manager in the same store, their cases could not legitimately be litigated all at once” (Tortorici 1). Commonality could not be presented in this case due to the 5-4 decision ratio that was delivered by Antonio Scalia, mentioned in the article. “Scalia argued that to claim ‘commonality’ a class must not only share a common problem, but also a common solution to that problem—one that would compensate all members equally in a single stroke” (Tortorici 1).
