The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision earlier today in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., No. 13-317 (Halliburton II), its most highly-anticipated class-action-related decision of the October 2013 term. Those who were hoping for a sea-change in securities class action jurisprudence were left disappointed, as the Court, in an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, declined to overrule its 25-year-old decision in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224 (1988). Rather than abolish the framework established in Basic, which provides a means for securities fraud plaintiffs to satisfy the elements of class certification through a class-wide presumption of reliance on material misrepresentations, the Court instead held that a defendant can rebut the presumption by demonstrating, at the class certification stage, that the alleged misrepresentations did not actually have any impact on the stock price. In doing so, the Court reversed the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision barring the defendant from offering evidence of non-impact on stock price at the class certification stage.
The Court distinguished its earlier decision in the same case, Erica P. John Fund, Inc. v. Halliburton Co., 563 U.S. ___ (2011) (Halliburton I), in which it held that a plaintiff should not be required to prove materiality of the alleged misrepresentation at the class certification stage. The distinction between the issue of materiality of a misrepresentation (a merits issue not appropriate for the class certification phase according to Halliburton I), and the issue of whether a misrepresentation actually had a common price impact on the stock (a proper class certification question according to Halliburton II) is the key to making sense of the Court’s decision today. As Justice Roberts stated:
[P]rice impact differs from materiality in a crucial respect. Given that the other Basic prerequisites must still be proved at the class certification stage, the common issue of materiality can be left to the merits stage without risking the certification of classes in which individual issues will end up overwhelming common ones. And because materiality is a discrete issue that can be resolved in isolation from the other prerequisites, it can be wholly confined to the merits stage.
Price impact is different. The fact that a misrepresentation “was reflected in the market price at the time of [the]transaction”—that it had price impact—is “Basic’s fundamental premise.” Halliburton I, 563 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7). It thus has everything to do with the issue of predominance at the class certification stage. That is why, if reliance is to be shown through the Basic presumption,the publicity and market efficiency prerequisites must be proved before class certification. Without proof of those prerequisites, the fraud-on-the-market theory underlying the presumption completely collapses, rendering class certification inappropriate.
Halliburton II, slip op., at 21-22. In other words, a merits question that is indisputedly common to the class should not be considered prior to class certification, but a merits question that also bears on whether the issues to be resolved at trial are truly common or individualized in the first place must be considered as part of the class certification decision.
Association, Causation, and the Fuzzy World of the Baysian p-Value in Class Actions
Posted in Class Action Trends, Commentary, tagged 10-b, 10b, anosmia, basic, baysian, class action statistics, hopson, kaye, matrixx, p-value, reasonable investor, scientific evidence, securities, securities class action, securities fraud, statistics, zicam on November 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
David H. Kaye, Distinguished Professor of Law and Weiss Family Faculty Scholar at the Penn State School of Law, recently published a fascinating commentary in the BNA Insights section of the BNA Product Safety & Liability and Class Action Reporters, entitled Trapped in the Matrixx: The U.S. Supreme Court And the Need for Statistical Significance. In the article, Professor Kaye applies his vast expertise in the areas of scientific evidence and statistics in the law to add some color to the U.S. Supreme Court’s March 2011 decision in the securities class action Matrixx Initiatives, Inc. v. Siracusano.
For those not familiar with Matrixx, the case involved allegations that the makers of the cold remedy product, Zicam, withheld information from investors suggesting that the product may cause a condition called anosmia, or loss of smell. At the risk of oversimplifying, the holding of Justice Sotomayor’s unanimous opinion can generally be summarized as follows: in a securities fraud action arising out of an alleged failure to disclose information about a possible causal link between a product and negative health effects, the plaintiff need not allege that the omitted information showed a statistically significant probability that the product causes the ill effects in order to establish that the information was material. The decision reaffirms the applicability of the reasonable investor standard for materiality announced in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, which looks to whether the omitted information would have “significantly altered the ‘total mix’ of information made available” to investors.
Thus, Matrixx eschews a bright-line rule (statistical significance) in favor of a more flexible “reasonable investor” standard. Professor Kaye does not take issue with the Court’s rejection of a bright line rule requiring a plaintiff to plead (and ultimately, prove) statistical significance of omitted information in the securities context. Instead, he is critical of the Court’s failure to articulate in better detail the technical shortcomings of using statistical significance as a bright-line rule, and he cautions against interpreting Matrixx as suggesting that something less than statistical significance would be appropriate to prove a causal link between a product and disease in other contexts. In other words, it is one thing to say that the causal link does not have to be statistically significant in order for information about an association between the product and disease to be meaningful to investors or consumers. It is another thing to say that statistical significance is unimportant when it is necessary to actually show evidence of a causal link itself, such as in the toxic tort context.
Although I followed and generally agreed with Professor Kaye’s article from a legal perspective, there were some technical concepts discussed in the article that were admittedly a bit over my head. Fortunately, I knew just who to ask for more insight, having recently worked with Justin Hopson of Hitachi Consulting on two CLE presentations discussing the use of statistics in class actions. Here are some of Justin’s observations after reading the article:
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