The Supreme Court decided in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes that the women could not move forward with their lawsuit as a class-action case against Walmart and would instead have to file individual lawsuits or smaller group claims. The main reason for this decision was the requirement of commonality which is an important part of class-action lawsuits. Commonality means that all the people in the group must share the same main legal issue and have experienced similar harm that can be solved with one general decision that applies to everyone. In this case, the Court said the women could not show that their experiences of discrimination were all the same or connected in a consistent way. They explained that Walmart did not have one single company-wide policy causing the issue, because decisions about pay and promotions were made by individual store managers rather than a central system. Since each store and manager could make different choices, the Court felt the situations of the women were too different to be handled together in one case. Because of this lack of a shared experience or unified policy, the Court ruled that the case did not meet the standard for a class-action lawsuit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Supreme Court decided in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes that the women could not move forward with their lawsuit as a class-action case against Walmart and would instead have to file individual lawsuits or smaller group claims. The main reason for this decision was the requirement of commonality which is an important part of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11416,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion-board-12-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11416"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13038,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13037\/revisions\/13038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0504-spring-2026-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}