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 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.

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).