Supreme Court declines to rule in Wal-Mart class action appeal News
Supreme Court declines to rule in Wal-Mart class action appeal

The US Supreme Court [official website] denied certiorari [order list, PDF] on Monday in two cases regarding Wal-Mart Stores [corporate website]. The petition raised the issue [petition, PDF] of whether the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause [text] prohibits a state court from certifying a class action and entering judgment in favor of the class, where the court relieves individual plaintiffs of their burden to prove “class-wide common evidence on key elements of their claims.” The court’s decision leaves intact a ruling [opinion, PDF] by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2014, which upheld a lower court decision awarding $187 million to the plaintiffs.

This is the most recent lawsuit of those filed against Wal-Mart in past years. In August 2013 a judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of California rejected [JURIST report] a potential gender discrimination class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart. In June 2012 New York City filed a derivative suit [JURIST report] in Delaware Chancery Court against Wal-Mart, alleging that both officers and board members of the company breached their fiduciary duties to shareholders by improperly handling reports of bribery that occurred in Mexico. In June 2011 a judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled [JURIST report] that a group of women seeking to recover damages from Wal-Mart could file lawsuits until October of that year. This ruling came after the US Supreme Court rejected the 2001 class action, and applied to the women who had received the required permission to sue from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) [official website]. In February 2011 Wal-Mart also escaped liability after a judge for the US District Court for the Western District of Michigan ruled [JURIST report] that Wal-Mart did not wrongly fire an employee who had been using medical marijuana to treat a brain tumor.

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