In the case of Wal-Mart v. Dukes in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a large group of women working at Wal-Mart couldn’t move forward with a class-action lawsuit claiming they were treated unfairly in pay and promotions. The women, who represented over 1.5 million employees, said that Wal-Mart’s company culture allowed for discrimination. However, the Court looked at whether these women had enough in common, a legal term called ‘commonality,’ to be part of a class-action lawsuit. According to a rule in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a class can only be formed if there are shared legal questions or facts among the members. The Court concluded that the women did not show enough commonality. Since local managers at Wal-Mart made their own decisions about pay and promotions, there wasn’t one clear policy that could be seen as the reason for discrimination for all the women. The Supreme Court pointed out that without something connecting their experiences, the case couldn’t go forward as a class-action. Justice Scalia noted that a class-action needs more than just similar complaints; it needs the complaints to come from the same issue that can be solved with a common legal solution, which wasn’t the case here.