Class Actions Brief Blog

Since the Supreme Court’s opinion in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413 (2021), litigants and courts alike have struggled to determine whether certain intangible harms are “concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent” such that a plaintiff has standing to sue. Indeed, this blog has previously analyzed cases addressing that question here and here.

The Fourth Circuit weighed in recently, holding that a subset of plaintiffs whose drivers’ license numbers were leaked and published online had standing to sue, but the plaintiffs whose numbers were leaked and ...

A recent North Carolina Supreme Court decision, Jackson v. Home Depot U.S.A. Inc., 919 S.E.2d 199 (N.C. 2025), highlights the importance of choice of law issues underlying putative class actions.

Plaintiff bought a home water treatment system from Carolina Water Systems while the company was offering rebates if customers made referrals. Carolina Water Systems was the authorized provider for these treatment systems through Home Depot in North and South Carolina. After plaintiff was sued by his credit card company to collect the amount owed for his system installation, plaintiff ...

This blog often focuses on traditional, opt-out class actions brought under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, but there is another common form of mass action: collective actions under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. More than 5,000 collective action lawsuits are filed each year under the FLSA and ADEA, making those claims among the most popular forms of mass action and worthy of continued attention.

The FLSA and ADEA allow for aggregate litigation by providing that claims can be brought by employees on behalf of themselves and “other ...

In Labcorp v. Davis, the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to decide if a federal court can certify a class that includes members who lack any Article III injury.  But as we discussed last month, the oral argument suggested that a procedural snag would stop the Court from deciding that question.

Sure enough, the Court has now decided not to decide the class-action question in Labcorp.  In a one-sentence order issued yesterday, June 5, the Court dismissed its review of the case as improvidently granted.  That order leaves the Ninth Circuit decision in Labcorp intact and the legal issue that has ...

We’ve written previously about courts’ differing approaches to ascertainability — an implicit requirement under Rule 23 that class members must be identifiable. A pending petition for certiorari in Career Counseling Inc. v. Amerifactors Financial Group LLC, No. 24-86 (2024), asks the Supreme Court to resolve some of these differences.

The petition originates with a District of South Carolina order denying class certification in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act case. Career Counseling, a staffing services company, filed a putative class action for alleged TCPA ...

A few months ago, we wrote about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to grant review in Labcorp v. Davis.  As we noted at the time, Labcorp raises a long-debated question of class-action law:  Can a federal court certify a class that includes members who lack any Article III injury?  As we also noted, the Supreme Court was expected to answer this question almost a decade ago in Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, but ultimately did not resolve it.

The wait may go on.  The Supreme Court held oral argument in Labcorp on April 29.  After more than two hours of discussion, most of the Justices appeared to ...

A recent Fourth Circuit decision extends the trend of cases refusing to use federal statutes to invalidate arbitration agreements waiving the right to bring class claims in federal court.

The statute at issue in Espin v. Citibank N.A., 126 F.4th 1010 (4th Cir. 2025)—the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (“SCRA”)—provides special legal protections to active-duty members of the military, including a cap on the interest rate they may be charged on credit cards. The plaintiffs were former servicemembers who alleged that Citibank violated SCRA by charging them market-rate ...

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Lytle v. Nutramax Laboratories Inc. affirming the certification of a class of owners of elderly dogs, alleging that the Cosequin supplement sold for canine joint health and mobility has no such benefit. That decision threatens to turn the circuit split over the standard for expert opinion at class certification into a major rift by permitting plaintiffs in the Ninth Circuit to rely on an expert model for which the expert “has not collected all of the necessary data to perform his ...

On January 24, 2025, the United States Supreme Court agreed to answer a question that has divided the circuits: Can a federal court certify a class containing members who lack any Article III injury? In Davis v. Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, a trial court in California certified a damages and injunctive relief class comprised of blind patients who—unliked sighted individuals—could not use LabCorp’s kiosks to access testing services. It did not matter to the trial court or to the Ninth Circuit that the class members had the option to bypass LabCorp’s kiosks ...

Glue is an object commonly found in schools, yet the “glue” that binds class action commonality appears to be a scarce commodity for students with disabilities and their parents. In September 2024, the Fourth Circuit decided that students with disabilities in Kanawha County, West Virginia, had suffered harms too individualized to be addressed together as a class.^[1]

This ruling reversed the trial court’s class certification decision, a ruling by Judge Irene Berger (S.D.W.Va.), who had found commonality among the students in that all had allegedly experienced harm through ...