In the Walmart Stores, Inc., et al. v. Dukes case (2011), the Supreme Court refused to allow the suit to advance as a class action. The matter was how Wal-Mart was accused by a number of its female employees of widespread gender discrimination in pay and promotions. The women intimated that they were joining together to bring forth this action on behalf of more than 1.5 million female workers who had reported similar problems at the company.

In other words, the Court’s ruling was premised on a principle known as “commonality,” which requires the people suing on their particular claims to demonstrate that they have sufficiently similar experiences, shared enough common legal issues to resolve their claims together. The Court ruled that the plaintiffs did not meet that requirement in this situation. They argued that the experiences of these women are dissimilar because pay and promotion decisions were made by different managers at different points throughout Wal-Mart stores and not by a distinct corporate-wide policy. This absence of a common practice would create the need for individualized analysis of each woman’s claim, and, therefore, the Court felt that it was not fair to group them all into a class action in that way.

They talked of some amount of evidence regarding gender bias existing in the practices of Wal-Mart, but the Court didn’t deem that bias consistent across all the plaintiffs’ experiences. To sum up, the Court has found that, while probably all the above women shared a general complaint about discrimination, the details of the individual cases were too different to treat them all together in one large collective lawsuit.

Hence, this judgment had a big effect on future class-action suits, especially against bigger companies. It meant that to assemble in collective litigation against such large issues as discrimination, the individual injury experiences must be seen to be similar enough; it made it greatly difficult. This ruling created a high evidentiary threshold before a case could be assumed to have been established as a class action-one that would make it difficult for workers or groups to bring corporations to sobriety about their systemic ramifications.