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 term means, as it is key to the court’s decision).
Answer: As we can read from open lab lecture information Wal-Mart v. Betty Dukes Betty Dukes case, the Supreme Court decided that the group of women could not bring their case as a class action lawsuit. The women argued that Wal-Mart had discriminated against them by paying them less and giving them fewer promotions than men. But the Court said they did not show enough Commonality. From the open lab information, ‘Commonality’ is mean that people in a class action lawsuit must share the same basic legal issues. Then the Court thought the women’s cases were too different from each other because decisions about pay and promotions were made by many different managers in many stores. Since there was no single company-wide policy that clearly caused discrimination, the Court said the women did not have enough in common to be treated as one large group. After that the Supreme Court justified it’s decision by saying that without commonality, the women could not be a single class in a class action lawsuit.