On June 20, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wal-Mart in the case of Wal-Mart v. Dukes, effectively ending the largest civil rights class action lawsuit in U.S. history. The Court decided that the plaintiffs, over a million women alleging gender discrimination. Could not proceed as a single class because their claims lacked the necessary “commonality.” Meaning that the group of people suing (the class) must share common legal or factual issues. In this case walmart won Because decisions about pay and promotions were made by many different managers across thousands of stores, the Court said there was no single common issue tying all their claims together, in other words, they must have suffered harm in a similar way due to the same cause. The justices concluded that Wal-Mart’s decentralized decision making structure did not demonstrate a consistent policy of discrimination. They also ruled that monetary damages were not appropriate for the type of class action that had been filed. This decision made it significantly more difficult to initiate large-scale discrimination cases as class actions in the future.