Supreme Court Sides With Wal-Mart in Sex-Bias Case

In one of the most closely watched cases of this term, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a lawsuit against Wal-Mart can’t go forward as a class action in its current form. The move reverses a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed the suit, potentially involving more than 1.5 million women, to go forward. It could have cost Wal-Mart billions of dollars in damages but now the women who brought the suit will have to pursue the cases on their own, writes the Associated Press.

The decision not to let the class action move forward was unanimous because all the justices agreed that this type of suit could not seek the type of monetary damages sought by the plaintiffs, explains the Los Angeles Times. Yet the justices divided 5-4 along ideological lines over another aspect that will probably translate into “new limits on class-action suits,” as Bloomberg points out.

The majority justices claimed the case did not make it clear there was one set of policies that led to discrimination against all workers at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores across the country. Rather, the company allowed individual store managers to decide on pay levels and promotions, according to the majority justices. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that there needs to be common elements in order to tie together “literally millions of employment decisions at once.” Scalia’s decision seems to suggest these types of claims can’t move forward unless there’s an overt company policy of discrimination. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court’s liberal wing that there was enough evidence of systematic sex discrimination for the suit to proceed and they would have returned the case to a lower court to give workers the chance to unite for a class action under a different legal theory.