The Wal-Mart case was brought by women who claimed they were being discriminated against in pay and promotions. The U.S. Supreme Court decided against a class-action lawsuit because of the concept of “commonality.” Commonality in legal terms means that all the people involved in a class-action lawsuit must share similar issues or experiences. For the case to move forward as a class-action, the Supreme Court said that the women suing Wal-Mart needed to prove that they had common claims that applied to everyone in the class. The Court argued that the women didn’t show enough evidence of a company-wide policy that was unfair to all female employees. Since the women couldn’t prove that Wal-Mart’s actions were consistently the same across the entire company, they couldn’t form a valid class to sue together.