1. 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). The initial basis between the Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc case is that 1.5 million female workers joined Betty Dukes in a class-action lawsuit through the commonality of feeling that Wal-Mart treats their femal employees worse than their male employees. The basis for this through multiple reasons, such as women being paid less than men across 41 different retail region, the wage gap between women and men increasing every year (where women would continue to earn less and less as the years went on despite, women typically making up more of the hourly workforce and women sticking around the job longer than men) and having those reasons justified by the men working within the stores (such as telling them to “doll up” if they ever wanted to advance in the company). From all of this, Betty Dukes and the 1.5 Million female workers within the class-action lawsuit demanded back-pay for the female workers due to this discrimination. What the supreme court ended up deciding from this case was to rule in favor of Wal-mart and to turn down the lawsuit that was filed against them. The reason why they did this is because two major reasons: the way that the supreme court classified the type of relief that the 1.5 million female workers were looking for and how much their “commonality” overlapped. Due the fact that the 1.5 female workers were asking for back pay (even though the major point of this case being the discrimination between males and female workers in wal-mart), the supreme court treated this as a b3 claim, which ended up compromising the class status of the women who joined in the lawsuit and prevented the case as being treated as a discriminatory issue. The other reason why the lawsuit was denied was because of the fact that the 1.5 million female workers that joined in the class-action lawsuit weren’t dealing with a problem that would require the same solution, which led to the supreme court decided that the women that were part of the lawsuit didn’t share any commonality with one another. These two reasons were what ultimately led to the supreme court ruling in favor of Wal-Mart.

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