"On its face, of course, that is just the opposite of a uniform employment practice that would provide the commonality needed for a class action," Justice Scalia wrote.
In 1997, rejecting an effort to settle the claims of "hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions" of people exposed to asbestos through a $1.3 billion class action, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg traced the history of attempts to bind together many claims in a single suit.
"If the sample could have sustained a reasonable jury finding as to hours worked in each employee's individual action, that sample is a permissible means of establishing the employees' hours worked in a class action," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's liberal wing.
C1 Business Digest C1 World Business W1 EDITORIAL A30-31 EditorialSARSARscarere in Toronto; Governor Pataki's Lower Manhattan; the Class Action Unfairness Act; justice for Iraq.
Unlike class-action lawyers, Justice can issue subpoenas, and it retrieved phone records from Apple and the five publishers, notes from meetings, and e-mails — twenty thousand from Penguin alone, according to an executive there.
The plaintiffs responded by noting that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had voted to certify an even larger class action in an antitrust case involving eight million merchants when she was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York.
"Today's proposal from Costa simply exploits the lengthy Italian justice system to scare people away from the class action," Mr. Ramadori said.
A class action lawsuit filed Wednesday in Mississippi by the ACLU and the MacArthur Justice Center wants to force the state to set limits on pre-indictment detention.
Joining together in a collective action by bringing a class action is the only way the courts can be used to have the possibility of justice for the members of the collective and, just as important, justice for the wrongdoer in terms of damages sufficient to create incentives to change behavior.
Yet most South Africans sought a restorative justice rather than judicial punishment or large monetary damages like an American-style class action suit.
In this term, the conservative justices supported a boilerplate clause crafted by American Express to bar consumers from bringing class action arbitration claims alleging antitrust violations.
