The Supreme Court’s decision in Dukes v. Walmart fundamentally changed how workplace discrimination cases could be pursued through class action lawsuits. The case, representing 1.5 million female Walmart employees alleging systematic gender discrimination, was struck down in a decision hinged on a seemingly technical legal concept: “commonality.”

What’s fascinating about this case is how the Court, mainly through Justice Scalia’s majority opinion, redefined what constitutes sufficient commonality for a class action. While traditionally, class members just needed to share common “questions of law or fact,” Scalia raised the bar significantly. Under the new interpretation, plaintiffs needed to demonstrate not just a common problem but also a common solution that could remedy all members’ grievances “in a single stroke.”

This might sound reasonable at first glance, but consider what this meant in practice. The Court essentially said that because different women at Walmart experienced discrimination in different ways – some denied specific promotions, others paid less than male colleagues, others facing hostile work environments – they couldn’t be considered a unified class. As Scalia put it, there wasn’t enough “glue holding the alleged reasons for all those decisions together.” But here’s what makes this reasoning problematic- it fundamentally misunderstands how modern workplace discrimination typically operates. As the Walmart case demonstrated, discrimination often manifests through countless individual decisions, biased corporate culture, and subtle systemic barriers. The statistical evidence was striking – women made up 72% of hourly employees but only 34% of management, and the wage gap increased every year after 1997, even though women had better performance ratings and longer tenure.

The implications of this decision extend far beyond Walmart. By setting such a high bar for commonality, the Court made it extraordinarily difficult for employees to challenge systemic discrimination at large companies through class actions. After all, the larger the company, the harder it becomes to show the kind of uniform discrimination the Court now requires.

The Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs (accusers) in the Betty Dukes v. Walmart Stores, Inc. case, ending the largest civil rights class action lawsuit in American history. The court ruled in that way because the plaintiffs failed to meet the “commonality” requirement for a class-action lawsuit. In other words, the plaintiffs couldn’t prove that all of Walmart female employees experienced the same type of discrimination, and their evidence wasn’t strong enough to show that there is a company-wide policy of discrimination against women.

In the Wal-Mart case, Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court denied the class action certification. The court ruled that plaintiffs over 1.5 million women accusing Wal-Mart of systemic sex discrimination did not satisfy an essential class-action requirement in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 23, known as commonality. This effectively concluded the case and returned the plaintiffs to square one. Commonality is a legal standard that determines whether a group of plaintiffs can be treated as a single class in a class action lawsuit. Under Rule 23, one of the key requirements for certifying a class is that the claims of the class members must share common questions os law or fact. That means that the questions raised by the plaintiffs must be sufficiently alike so that they can be litigated together and not individually. In the case of Dukes, the court decided that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that their discrimination claims were adequately unified to meet the requirements for commonality. The class consisted of 1.5 million women who allegedly suffered different kinds of discrimination; for example, different pay, different managers, and different regions. The Court felt that these individual differences meant plaintiffs did not share a common legal or factual issue that could be resolved in a single lawsuit. The majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia relied heavily on this lack of commonality among plaintiff’s claims. Scalia argued that to have a class action, the plaintiffs must show that they suffered under a common discriminatory treatment or the same cause of discrimination in a manner so that one solution would be applicable. Emphasizing, he said, “Women weren’t universally denied the same promotion or the same raise. The alleged discrimination wasn’t the result of a single policy or some sort of centralized plan. It was instead based on the discretionary decisions by individual managers at individual stores.” And there lacked any “glue” to hold together all plaintiffs’ claims in a single class action. Scalia said that without a clear common discriminatory practice that applied uniformly to all women across the country, it was impossible to adjudicate their claims as a single class. The courts decision focused on whether the plaintiffs claims were sufficiently connected, or “common” in a way that would justify handling them together in a single lawsuit. Scalia argued that the size of the class, and the diversity of their experience, made this impossible. The plaintiffs had sought both injunctive relief-that is, a change in Wal-Mart practices-and monetary damages (back pay for the discrimination), but the court ruled that because they were not all subject to the same policies or treatment these claims could not be addressed in one class action. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the dissent, felt that commonality had been interpreted incorrectly by the Court. According to her, what the claims of the women shared in common was the systematic gender bias prevailing at Wal-Mart, though unwritten as policy, everywhere within the firm. She said the plaintiffs need not prove that each individual faced the same discrimination but only prove that their claims were based upon a common discriminatory practice. This practice of male favoritism with respect to pay, promotion, and other opportunities was, in her view, sufficient to satisfy the commonality requirement. She noted that discretionary practices may also support systemic discrimination. The commonality requirement is core to class actions because it ensures that the court can effectively address the plaintiffs claims in a manner that is efficient and fair. If the claims in a way are too individual or too diverse, then the court may determine that the issues are better addressed in separate lawsuits. For example, if different workers at different Wal-Mart stores faced discrimination in radically different ways, each woman would have a different story about how she was discriminated against, making it more difficult for the court to address all their issues in one case.

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 is commonality”(and how it related to “class section lawsuit”). Try to understand what this legal terms means, as it is key to the courts decision).-The Supreme Court in the Wal-Mart stores case denied the class action suit. The reason that the case was denied was due to the plaintiffs failure to establish “commonality”. With the case the thing is that the women failed to prove one common issue in which it would end up linking all of their claims when it came to the case. The main problem was that the Supreme Court said that pay and promotion decisions towards people are based on managers, so since the manager decides it’s not possible to sue the whole company since the whole company can’t be held responsible for manager decisions, especially when there are various different experiences that women have had. Because of this the Supreme Court had to rule that the case did not meet the requirements for a class action and it was thrown out.

These questions are based on the “Sex Class Action” article:

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).