Supreme Court Sides With Wal-Mart on Class Action Question

Tuesday, 21 June 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Probably the biggest national story today was yesterday’s Supreme Court decision regarding the Wal-Mart class action case. The New York Times stresses that this was not a decision about whether Wal-Mart discriminated against female workers as the lawsuit alleged. Rather, the court agreed with the retail giant that the way lawyers packaged 1.5 million female workers into a single lawsuit was unconstitutional. Lawyers for the plaintiffs had tried to meet the basic requirements for a class-action suit by gathering anecdotes from female Wal-Mart employees all around the country; all nine judges agreed that they “had improperly sued under a part of the class-action rules that was not primarily concerned with monetary claims.” Only five justices, however, voted in favor of Wal-Mart.