The Supreme Court decided to close the Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. case, as they found technical legal issues involving too many women as a problem and could not be seen as a valid case. The court questioned if the plaintiffs could file this type of lawsuit while asking for both injunctive and monetary relief. The court also then thought about how many out of the 1.5 million people shared “commonality”. How many of these women were all actually denied of higher pay, denied of promotions, worked in the same store or under the same management to be filed under the same lawsuit. Legal issues about how the claim came about was also a problem. The women in Dukes filed as a b(2) class, looking for injunctive relief, instead of a b(3) claim, looking for monetary compensation. Almost a billion dollars worth of damages would have to be distributed.

The Supreme Court decided to end the big class-action lawsuit with the 1.5 million women who worked at Walmart. The women said Walmart treated them unfair, paying them less and not giving them promotions just because they were women. But the Court said the women’s case couldn’t be one big class-action lawsuit because they didn’t have enough “commonality” which is bizzar in my opinion. Commonality means that everyone in the group has to share the same problem and the same solution. The Court said since not all the women had the same exact experience or were treated the same way, they couldn’t all be part of one lawsuit. Also, the Court said that the women asked for money back pay and changes to the company’s rules, but the law says you have to separate those two kinds of claims. Because the women mixed these claims, the Court said their class wasn’t valid. So, the Court sent the case back and made it harder for the women to fight together. The judges thought it was too hard to find one answer that works for all the 1.5 million women since each person’s situation was different. This decision made it really tough for big groups to sue companies when the problems aren’t exactly the same for everyone.

1. What did the Supreme Court decide in the Wal-Mart case? And more importantly, how did it justify its decision? (HINT: the key word here is “commonality” (and how it related to “class-action lawsuit”). Try to understand what this legal terms means, as it is key to the court’s decision).
   • In the Dukes v. Wal-Mart case, the Supreme Court decided that over a million women could not move forward with their class action lawsuit for sex discrimination. The Court said the women didn’t meet the “commonality” requirement, meaning they didn’t all share the same specific harm or experience. Even though the plaintiffs showed years of data proving women were paid less and promoted less than men, the Court focused on the idea that the discrimination wasn’t identical for each person. This technical detail let the Court avoid addressing the bigger issue of gender bias at the company. Justice Scalia claimed there wasn’t enough “glue” holding the women’s experiences together, while Justice Ginsburg pointed out that corporate discretion can still lead to widespread discrimination. The ruling basically said that if the harm doesn’t look exactly the same, it doesn’t count as a shared problem. That’s a narrow way to look at justice. The decision shut the door on one of the most powerful tools workers have to fight unfair treatment together. It made clear that the legal system doesn’t always protect people equally; especially not when bias is buried in everyday systems.

1. What did the Supreme Court decide in the Wal-Mart case? And more importantly, how did it justify its decision? (HINT: the key word here is “commonality” (and how it related to “class-action lawsuit”). Try to understand what this legal terms means, as it is key to the court’s decision).
   • In the Dukes v. Wal-Mart case, the Supreme Court decided that over a million women could not move forward with their class action lawsuit for sex discrimination. The Court said the women didn’t meet the “commonality” requirement, meaning they didn’t all share the same specific harm or experience. Even though the plaintiffs showed years of data proving women were paid less and promoted less than men, the Court focused on the idea that the discrimination wasn’t identical for each person. This technical detail let the Court avoid addressing the bigger issue of gender bias at the company. Justice Scalia claimed there wasn’t enough “glue” holding the women’s experiences together, while Justice Ginsburg pointed out that corporate discretion can still lead to widespread discrimination. The ruling basically said that if the harm doesn’t look exactly the same, it doesn’t count as a shared problem. That’s a narrow way to look at justice. The decision shut the door on one of the most powerful tools workers have to fight unfair treatment together. It made clear that the legal system doesn’t always protect people equally; especially not when bias is buried in everyday systems.

In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court ruled against a group of about 1.5 million women who wanted to file a class-action lawsuit claiming Wal-Mart discriminated against them in pay and promotions. The key issue was commonality — meaning the women had to show they all faced the same kind of discrimination in a similar way.

The Court decided there wasn’t enough common ground to group all their claims together. Since the women worked in different stores with different managers, and there wasn’t a clear, company-wide policy of discrimination, the justices said their experiences were too different to be handled as one case.

So even though many women may have felt they were treated unfairly, the Court said each case would need to be looked at individually. This ruling made it much harder for large groups of people to bring class-action lawsuits unless they can clearly prove a shared experience or pattern of harm that connects them all.

The Supreme Court ruled against the women workers who were trying to sue Wal-Mart as a group in a class action lawsuit for gender discrimination. Basically, these women argued that Wal-Mart had a company-wide pattern of paying women less and promoting them less often than men.

But the Court said the group of women couldn’t move forward as a single class, and the main reason came down to the idea of “commonality.”

In legal terms, commonality means that the people in a class action lawsuit must all have a shared legal issue or experience. The Court decided that the women didn’t have enough in common meaning, their situations weren’t similar enough. Wal-Mart didn’t have a single, official company policy that was discriminatory. Instead, decisions about pay and promotion were mostly left to local managers. So the Court said there was no clear, common reason to hold Wal-Mart responsible across the board.

That reasoning made it much harder for large groups of workers to sue big companies together in cases like this. Even though many of the women had similar stories, the Court said that wasn’t enough under the rules for class action lawsuits.

• The Supreme Court found that the lawsuit could not proceed as a class action in the Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart case, ruling against the female employees. The multitude of women who had worked at Wal-Mart and were alleging discrimination would not be able to file a lawsuit collectively. Each woman would have to file a case on her own and the Court used the legal notion of “commonality” to support its ruling. The plaintiffs in a class action case must have a common legal issue or experience that links their claims in order for the litigation to be certified. The majority judgment was written by Justice Scalia, who contended that the circumstances of the women were too dissimilar to be considered a single class. He emphasized that recruiting and promotion choices were left to individual shop managers and that there was no official business policy to discriminate against women. The Court ruled that there was no one “common answer” that could account for the prejudice that all of the women had to endure because each manager behaved separately. The plaintiffs provided statistical proof indicating women were routinely paid less and promoted less than males, but the court ruled that this was insufficient to demonstrate that the entire group had suffered from the same kind of discrimination.

In the Wal-Mart v. Dukes case, the Supreme Court decided that the group of women could not move forward with their class action lawsuit. The main reason was that the court said the women did not meet the requirement of commonality. This legal term means that people in a group lawsuit must all share the same problem and that the solution could apply to all of them.

The Court said that the 1.5 million women had different experiences at different stores and under different managers. Since there was no clear company-wide policy that directly caused discrimination, the Court believed that the women’s claims were too different to be treated as one case. Even though the women showed patterns of unequal pay and promotion, the court said that these patterns were not enough to prove that they all experienced the same type of unfair treatment.

Because of this decision, each woman would have to file their own case instead of joining together. This made it harder for workers to take action as a group against large companies. The Court’s choice focused more on technical rules than on the bigger issue of discrimination in the workplace.

1. The Supreme Court decided that in Wal-Mart v Dukes that there was not enough “commonality” with their claims. Meaning because all of the women had different managers, worked in different store locations and all had different circumstances they couldn’t show that they were all affected in the same way.  When dealing with a class action lawsuit it is required that all of the victims are affected in the same way.