The award-winning U.S. Supreme Court blog SCOTUSblog is presenting a symposium on recent Supreme Court developments in the area of class actions that you won’t want to miss. Click here for an introduction to the symposium and here to see a list of the various contributions as they are released. I’m extremely honored to be listed among the other fine contributors to the series.
Archive for August, 2011
Don’t Miss the Class Action Symposium on SCOTUSblog
Posted in Articles, Class Action Trends, Commentary, Other class action blogs, Supreme Court Decisions, tagged class action, class action symposium, Class Action Trends, class certification, dukes, erica p. john fund, halliburton, scotus, smith v. bayer, Supreme Court, wal-mart on August 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Presentation Materials for Tomorrow’s CLE Webinar on the Supreme Court’s Dukes, Bayer, and Halliburton Decisions
Posted in Class Action Trends, CLE Programs, tagged bayer, class certification, cle, CLE program, commonality, dukes, eisen, employment class action, erica p. john fund, fraud on the market, halliburton, securities class action, smith v. bayer, webinar on August 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »
It’s not too late to sign up for tomorrow’s Strafford Publications Webinar Class Certification After Dukes, Bayer and Halliburton Rulings. As a preview, here is a copy of the written materials for my portion of the presentation, Opposing Class Certification After Dukes, Bayer and Halliburton. I hope you can make it.
Second Circuit Court of Appeals Summons Amchem and Ortiz in Rejecting Class Action Settlement
Posted in Class Action Decisions, Class Action Settlements, Federal Court Decisions, tagged adequacy, amchem, class action objectors, class action settlement, class certification, fairness hearing, final approval, ortiz, second circuit on August 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »
As I have noted in a series of posts recently, class action settlement objectors should not be taken lightly. (See this August 1, 2011 post and others cited within). Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals offered an excellent case in point in its decision in In re Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation, No. 05-5943-cv(L) (2d Cir., Aug. 17, 2011), in which a two-judge majority sided with ten objectors in vacating the approval of a class action settlement involving copyright infringement claims by freelance authors against various publishers who provide content in online databases. Based in part on principles limiting settlement class certification that were recognized in two well-known Supreme Court opinions from the late 1990s, Amchem Prods., Inc. v. Windsor, 521 U.S. 591, 620 (1997) and Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp., 527 U.S. 815 (1999), the court held that the interests of various subclasses within a proposed settlement class had interests that were too divergent to be adequately represented by a single group of class representatives and class counsel. Andrew Trask has a good summary and some insightful commentary about the decision and its potential future impact on his blog, Class Action Countermeasures. Alison Frankel offers additional perspective in her column for Thompson Reuters, On the Case.
… And One More Decision Invalidating a Class Arbitration Waiver Following Concepcion
Posted in Class Action Decisions, tagged ambiguity, ambiguous, arbitration, AT&T Mobility, class arbitration waiver, concepcion, FAA, federal preemption, foulke, new jersey, preemption on August 17, 2011| 1 Comment »
In an entry entitled Concepcion, Four Long Months Later, I summarized several decisions evaluating class arbitration waiver provisions following the Concepcion decision. I neglected to include the case of NAACP of Camden County East v. Foulke Management Corp., ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2011), in which a New Jersey state appellate court held an arbitration provision unenforceable under state law on ambiguity grounds.
Bruce D. Greenberg has a synopsis of the decision on his blog, New Jersey Appellate Law, along with a link to the opinion.
Don’t Miss this Exciting CLE Webinar: “Class Certification After Dukes, Bayer and Halliburton Rulings”
Posted in CLE Programs, tagged bayer, class certification, CLE program, dukes, erica p. john fund, halliburton, rule 23, scotus, smith v. bayer, Supreme Court, u.s. supreme court, wal-mart, webinar on August 4, 2011| 1 Comment »
For those of you who simply can’t get enough of the Supreme Court’s recent class action rulings, I will be speaking in an upcoming live phone/web seminar sponsored by Strafford Publications entitled “Class Certification After Dukes, Bayer and Halliburton Rulings.” The Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, August 30, 1:00pm-2:30pm EDT. Here is a summary:
The Supreme Court’s watershed Dukes v. Wal-Mart ruling set new standards for Rule 23(a) class certification and provided guidance to the level of merits inquiry appropriate at the certification stage. It also clarified when a claim for monetary relief can be made under Rule 23(b). While Dukes is a shift in defendants’ favor, the Court refused in Smith v. Bayer to curtail relitigation of class actions in parallel state court litigation. Federal courts may not enjoin state courts from considering certification when a federal court has denied certification of the same class. In Erica John Fund v. Halliburton, the Court held that loss causation is not a prerequisite to class certification in a securities action. However, the Court did not address the existing circuit court divergence on whether a court should examine evidence of price impact at the certification stage. My fellow panelists and I developed this program to analyze three key Supreme Court rulings, Dukes, Bayer and Halliburton and their impact on current class certification jurisprudence. We will discuss how plaintiff and defendant counsel can best leverage or overcome the impact of these rulings in certification proceedings. We will offer our perspectives and guidance on these and other critical questions: What impact will Dukes have on the use of statistics and expert testimony in support of class certification? How will commonality and numerosity be applied after Dukes? What guidance, if any, does the Bayer case provide regarding relitigating competing class actions where class certification has already been granted? In light of Halliburton, should a district court examine evidence of price impact at the class certification stage, and if so, who has the burden of proof? After our presentations, we will engage in a live question and answer session with participants — so we can answer your questions about these important issues directly. I hope you’ll join us.
For more information or to register, visit the Strafford website at this link.
BNA Reporter Article, Class Action Settlement Objectors: Minor Nuisance or Serious Threat to Final Approval?
Posted in Articles, Commentary, tagged bna reporter, class action objection, class action objector, class action settlement, fairness hearing, final approval, objection deadline, objector, professional objector, public interest objector on August 1, 2011| 1 Comment »
Raj Chohan and I recently co-authored an article entitled Class Action Settlement Objectors: Minor Nuisance or Serious Threat to Final Approval?, which appears on page 739 of the July 11, 2011 edition of the BNA Product Safety & Liability Reporter. The article is only available online to subscribers, but the publisher gave me a box full of copies to distribute, so please feel free to contact me if you’d like one. For those who lack the patience required for a snail mail version, the article is a more polished (thanks to Raj) compilation of a series of posts that originally appeared here on CAB earlier this year:
- Warding Off “Professional” Objectors to Class Action Settlements, March 31, 2011
- When 36 AGs Object to Your Class Action Settlement, That’s Not a Good Sign, April 12, 2011
- Public Interest Objectors in Class Action Settlements, April 21, 2011
- DirectBuy Settlement Rejected, May 16, 2011
Perspectives on the October 2010 Supreme Court Term
Posted in Articles, Class Action Trends, Commentary, tagged bayer, class action, class certification, dukes, erica p. john fund, halliburton, scotus, scotusblog, Supreme Court, u.s. supreme court, wal-mart on August 31, 2011| Leave a Comment »
My submission to the SCOTUSblog Class Action Symposium is now available for viewing. Click the title below for the link:
The October 2010 Supreme Court Term in review: For defendants, life returns to normal after the celebration ends
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