Class Actions Brief Blog

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 ...

Our colleague Erik Zimmerman reported in an earlier post the memorable declaration from defense counsel in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413 (2021): when a legal violation results in no harm, those involved should “break out the champagne,” not “break out a lawsuit.”

In TransUnion, decided in 2021, the Supreme Court grappled with a question that has vexed federal courts in recent years: how much leeway should plaintiffs have to bring federal suits based on “intangible harms”? Article III courts have been redressing obvious harms to person and pocketbook since the ...

The Sixth Circuit appears poised to become the fourth federal court of appeals to reject the use of the “juridical link” doctrine as a means to establish Article III standing in a class action. The doctrine, a seldom-used class action legal concept, recognizes an exception to the ordinary Article III standing requirements in instances in which “all defendants are juridically related in a manner that suggests a single resolution of the dispute would be expeditious.” Thompson v. Bd. of Educ. of Romeo Cmty, Sch., 709 F.2d 1200, 1204-05 (6th Cir. 1983).

A “juridical ...

A leading feature of the Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes is the “rigorous scrutiny” the trial court must apply to determine whether the evidence plaintiffs offer to support class certification meets the requirements of Rule 23. Following the Supreme Court’s decisions in Wal-Mart and Comcast, “[i]t is now indisputably the role of the district court to scrutinize the evidence before granting certification, even when doing so ‘requires inquiry into the merits of the claim.’” Rail Freight, 725 F.3d at 253 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (quoting Comcast ...

The Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Bell v. Brockett, No. 18-1149 (4th Cir. Apr. 25, 2019), posits that “[d]efendant class actions are so rare they have been compared to unicorns.” But what may be even rarer is an opinion, like Bell, in which a court opines on the fundamental and concerning nature of the district court’s clear errors regarding the appointment of class counsel, but nonetheless decides not to reverse. 

Bell arises from the ZeekRewards.com (“Zeek”) fraud scheme. Zeek offered participants the opportunity to share in revenues generated by Zeek’s supposed ...

Standing to sue, a venerable piece of American jurisprudence for sure, continues to draw attention in recent class action cases, including in the Fourth Circuit. In its second decision this year evaluating last term’s Supreme Court decision, Spokeo v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit found insufficient “an informational injury” the lead plaintiff advanced under the Fair Credit Reporting Act—the same statute under review in Spokeo.  Dreher v. Experian Information Solutions Inc., 856 F. 3d 337 (4th Cir. May 11, 2017). See also Beck v ...

The nomination of Tenth Circuit Judge Neil M. Gorsuch for the Supreme Court has jurists and reporters forecasting how, if confirmed, he will rule in cases raising “hot” Constitutional issues. The “hot” question for those of us who litigate class actions is how Justice Gorsuch would engage the next landmark class action, especially since he would replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Court, author of two of the most significant class action opinions in recent years, Comcast Corp. v. Behrend and Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes.

We will be examining some of Judge Gorsuch’s ...