Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Seventh Circuit (Posner, J.) reaffirms class certification after post-Comcast GVR

Following its decision in Comcast v. Behrend, the Supreme Court remanded a number of class actions for reconsideration (two in April and one in June). Last month, the Sixth Circuit found that class certification remained proper in Glazer v. Whirlpool, a class action involving defective washing machines. The Seventh Circuit has now done the same in a similar washing machine class action against Sears. The entire opinion (Butler v. Sears) is worth a read; Judge Posner’s discussion of Comcast starts on page 5. Here are some excerpts:

[p.6] Unlike the situation in Comcast, there is no possibility in this case that damages could be attributed to acts of the defendants that are not challenged on a class‐wide basis; all members of the mold class attribute their damages to mold and all members of the control‐unit class to a defect in the control unit.

[p.7] Sears compares the design changes that may have affected the severity of the mold problem to the different antitrust liability theories in Comcast. But it was not the existence of multiple theories in that case that precluded class certification; it was the plaintiffs’ failure to base all the damages they sought on the antitrust impact—the injury—of which the plaintiffs were complaining. In contrast, any buyer of a Kenmore washing machine who experienced a mold problem was harmed by a breach of warranty alleged in the complaint.

[p.7] Furthermore and fundamentally, the district court in our case, unlike Comcast, neither was asked to decide nor did decide whether to determine damages on a class‐wide basis. As we explained in McReynolds v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., 672 F.3d 482, 491–92 (7th Cir. 2012), distinguishing Wal‐Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2541 (2011), a class action limited to determining liability on a class‐wide basis, with separate hearings to determine—if liability is established—the damages of individual class members, or homogeneous groups of class members, is permitted by Rule 23(c)(4) and will often be the sensible way to proceed. See Advisory Committee Notes to 1966 Amendment of Rule 23(b)(3); Pella Corp. v. Saltzman, 606 F.3d 391, 393–94 (7th Cir. 2010) (per curiam).

[pp.8-9] Sears thinks that predominance is determined simply by counting noses: that is, determining whether there are more common issues or more individual issues, regardless of relative importance. That’s incorrect. An issue “central to the validity of each one of the claims” in a class action, if it can be resolved “in one stroke,” can justify class treatment. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, supra, 131 S. Ct. at 2551. That was said in the context of Rule 23(a)(2), the rule that provides that class actions are permissible only when there are issues common to the members of the class (as of course there are in this case). But predominance requires a qualitative assessment too; it is not bean counting. In Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds, supra, 133 S. Ct. at 1196, the Court said that the requirement of predominance is not satisfied if “individual questions…overwhelm questions common to the class,” and in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, 521 U.S. 591, 623 (1997), it said that the “predominance inquiry tests whether proposed classes are sufficiently cohesive to warrant adjudication by representation.” And in In re Inter‐Op Hip Prosthesis Liability Litigation, 204 F.R.D. 330, 345 (N.D. Ohio 2001), we read that “common issues need only predominate, not outnumber individual issues.” Or as we put it in Messner v. Northshore University HealthSystem, 669 F.3d 802, 819 (7th Cir. 2012), “Under the district court’s approach [which our decision in Messner rejected], Rule 23(b)(3) would require not only common evidence and methodology, but also common results for members of the class. That approach would come very close to requiring common proof of damages for class members, which is not required. To put it another way, the district court asked not for a showing of common questions, but for a showing of common answers to those questions. Rule 23(b)(3) does not impose such a heavy burden.”

[pp.9-10] It would drive a stake through the heart of the class action device, in cases in which damages were sought rather than an injunction or a declaratory judgment, to require that every member of the class have identical damages. If the issues of liability are genuinely common issues, and the damages of individual class members can be readily determined in individual hearings, in settlement negotiations, or by creation of subclasses, the fact that damages are not identical across all class members should not preclude class certification. Otherwise defendants would be able to escape liability for tortious harms of enormous aggregate magnitude but so widely distributed as not to be remediable in individual suits. As we noted in Carnegie v. Household Int’l, Inc., 376 F.3d 656, 661 (7th Cir. 2004), “the more claimants there are, the more likely a class action is to yield substantial economies in litigation. It would hardly be an improvement to have in lieu of this single class 17 million suits each seeking damages of $15 to $30…. The realistic alternative to a class action is not 17 million individual suits, but zero individual suits, as only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $30” (emphasis in original). The present case is less extreme: tens of thousands of class members, each seeking damages of a few hundred dollars. But few members of such a class, considering the costs and distraction of litigation, would think so meager a prospect made suing worthwhile.

[p.10] There is a single, central, common issue of liability: whether the Sears washing machine was defective. Two separate defects are alleged, but remember that this class action is really two class actions. In one the defect alleged involves mold, in the other the control unit. Each defect is central to liability. Complications arise from the design changes and from separate state warranty laws, but can be handled by the creation of subclasses. See, e.g., Johnson v. Meriter Health Services Employee Retirement Plan, supra, 702 F.3d at 365 (10 subclasses). These are matters for the district judge to consider in the first instance***.

--A

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/civpro/2013/08/seventh-circuit-posner-j-reaffirms-class-certification-after-post-comcast-gvr.html

Class Actions, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Recent Decisions, Supreme Court Cases | Permalink

Comments

Post a comment