By now pretty much the whole world has heard about the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the WalMart discrimination case yesterday.
CNN.com this morning phrased it "the high-profile case -- perhaps the most closely watched of the high court's term -- is among the most important dealing with corporate vs. worker rights that the justices have ever heard, and could eventually affect nearly every private employer, large and small."
To be sure, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "The decision is sure to reverberate in other employment class actions, with lower courts scrutinizing more carefully the factors that constitute a class for the purpose of bringing mass claims." MSNBC.com said, "Corporations are lauding and workers' rights groups are bemoaning the Supreme Court's much-anticipated decision, which derailed what would have been the biggest gender bias class action suit in U.S. history."
The MSNBC article also quoted Robert Langran, a Supreme Court expert and a Villanova University political science professor, as saying "When you get a company that’s as huge as Wal-Mart and then try to get an all-encompassing class-action suit, it’s not going to go… But it raises the question: What is too big? Where do you draw the line?"
"The case split the court 5-4 along its ideological divide, with Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion concluding the allegations against Wal-Mart were too vague and the evidence too weak to establish the common injury essential to encompass all women employed since 1998 in the roughly 3,400 U.S. Wal-Mart stores,” the Journal said, with the New York Times, however, noting, too, that "the court was unanimous, however, in saying that the plaintiffs' lawyers had improperly sued under a part of the class-action rules that was not primarily concerned with monetary claims."
WalMart Stores v. Dukes, 10-277
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