Individualism in Legal Process and the Wal-Mart Case
Monday’s high court decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes has predictably drawn a strong reaction from legal academia, much of it critical of the Court. Of particular interest are the comments of Richard Primus (Michigan) at the New York Times‘s “Room for Debate” and Alexandra Lahav (Connecticut) at Mass Tort Litigation Blog. According to Primus and Lahav, the decision is the latest sign that the current Supreme Court leans toward a principle of “individualism” in applying the rules of civil litigation. Lahav in particular appears to view this as a shame, since “a more collectivist view” would carry with it more “potential for social reform.”
What does a term like “individualism” mean in the context of litigation procedure? One of its implications is that legal rights to redress on the one hand, and legal responsibility or culpability on the other, are ordinarily things that appertain to individual litigants, and ought not (absent clear authorization by statute or Constitution) be submerged into group claims on the one hand or group guilt on the other. In particular, we should be wary of proposals to deprive litigants of the choice to obtain individualized consideration of their claims or defenses on the grounds that society can accomplish more if it processes litigation in batches while accepting, say, statistical as distinct from personalized proofs.
Lahav and other scholars such as Samuel Issacharoff offer as examples numerous cases in which the Court has insisted on individualized process, often thereby frustrating the advocates of social reform in one or another area. The Court’s scruples on this matter have run into much adverse comment in the academic literature, and that’s hardly a surprise; as I argue in my book Schools for Misrule, today’s legal academy is far more keen on things like group rights and social engineering (as some of us might call it) than is the wider society.
Let me offer a few observations in defense or at least explanation of the Court’s approach:
1) The individualist leaning is by no means confined to the “conservative” justices; all nine members of the current Court partake of it to varying extents, and it is one major reason why the Court’s liberal justices joined in to make the Wal-Mart decision unanimous on one of its most practically significant issues, relating to the handling of claims for back pay.
2) Like so many other aspects of the Court’s work, this one does not fit well into simplistic accounts from some quarters about the Court’s supposed “pro-business” stance. In many circumstances business defendants actually prefer some degree of collectivization of claims, because their main practical concern is to put an end to litigation, and group resolution can do that. In the Court’s landmark 1997 Amchem Products v. Windsor decision, six of eight voting justices (Breyer and Stevens dissenting in part) struck down a giant batch settlement of asbestos litigation that had been ardently pursued by many of the nation’s biggest businesses, as well as many plaintiff advocates, on the grounds that it improperly denied claimants their right to individualized justice.
3) If the question is one of faithfulness to the constitutional vision of law held by the Founders, there really isn’t much of a question: like other Anglo-Americans of Blackstone’s era those Founders saw the courts as dispensers of individualized justice if they were to be anything at all. Much else in American law has changed beyond recognition in the intervening two-plus centuries. Fortunately, as the result in Wal-Mart v. Dukes suggests, that hasn’t.
For more commentary on the Wal-Mart case, check out (e.g.) editorials at the Washington Post, New York Daily News and Omaha World Herald (favoring the court’s view), and the New York Times and USA Today (opposing), as well as my contributions in the Philadelphia Inquirer and at Overlawyered.
Wal-Mart v. Dukes: The Court Gets One Right
In today’s decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court unanimously found that the Ninth Circuit had jumped the gun in certifying what would have been one of the largest class actions in history, a job-bias action against the giant retailer on behalf of female employees. A five-justice majority led by Justice Scalia found that the plaintiffs had clearly not met the requirements needed to have the case certified for class treatment; four dissenters led by Justice Ginsburg would have sent the case back for more consideration.
While some press commentary simplistically treated this case as a “Which Side Are You On” parable of workplace sexism, both the majority and the dissent spend much time grappling with more lawyerly issues specific to class actions as a procedural format, such as the exact role of “common questions,” whose implications will inevitably be felt in litigation far removed from the employment discrimination context. To sweep hundreds of thousands of workers (or consumers or investors) into a class as plaintiffs even if they personally have suffered no harm whatsoever — to use sexism at Arizona stores to generate back pay awards in Vermont, and statistical disparities to prove bias without allowing defendants to introduce evidence that a given worker’s treatment was fair — bends the class action mechanism beyond its proper capacity. Also to the point, it is unfair.
Because both class action law and employment discrimination law are in the end creatures of federal statute, the elected branches will have the last word. Advocates of expansive employment litigation can be expected to introduce legislation in Congress to overturn key elements of today’s decision, a strategy that has worked well for them in the past on issues like back pay, “disparate-impact” law and the scope of coverage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). While we will soon be hearing a drumbeat to that effect, Congress should resist it, because the majority’s opinion today is to be preferred as a matter of policy, fairness, and liberty.
In particular — to take just one of the policy issues in employment law brought to center stage by today’s case — plaintiffs seek to establish that Wal-Mart’s policy of decentralized manager discretion over pay and promotions is itself an unlawful practice because (they argue) it allows too wide a scope for (unconscious or otherwise) bias on the part of store managers, notwithstanding the company’s adoption of overall policies banning sex bias. The majority led by Scalia marveled that Wal-Mart’s corporate non-policy — that is, its decision not to micromanage its local executives on personnel choices — would wind up being legally interpreted as amounting to an affirmative centralized decision to discriminate. But it’s not — and we should be glad lawyers at every big company aren’t yet insisting that every local HR decision be sent to a distant headquarters for fear of liability.
Wal-Mart Could Help DC in More Ways than One
It’s good news for residents of Washington, D.C., that Wal-Mart is planning on opening four stores in the District. Yet Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney reports today on one curious source of opposition:
“There’ll probably be a lot of shoplifting going on. They’ll need a lot of security,” Terriea Sutton, 35, said.
Brenda Speaks, a Ward 4 ANC commissioner, actually urged blocking construction of the planned store in her ward at Georgia and Missouri avenues NW partly because of that risk. Addressing a small, anti-Wal-Mart rally at City Hall on Monday, Speaks said young people would get criminal records when they couldn’t resist the temptation to steal.
Of course, that’s a rationale for banning all stores, not just Wal-Mart. Perhaps we should isolate these youths and consign them to abject poverty, so they’ll never be around anything worth stealing. (A Wal-Mart spokesman commented that with regard to crime, “there is no more concern over these District locations than any other store locations.”)
Or we could recognize that Wal-Mart helps pull people out of poverty. As Obama economic adviser Jason Furman reminds us:
Wal-Mart’s low prices help to increase real wages for the 120 million Americans employed in other sectors of the economy. And the company itself does not appear to pay lower wages or benefits than similar companies, or to cause substantially lower wages in the retail sector…
[T]o the degree the anti-Wal-Mart campaign slows or halts the spread of Wal-Mart to new areas, it will lead to higher prices that disproportionately harm lower-income families…
By acting in the interests of its shareholders, Wal-Mart has innovated and expanded competition, resulting in huge benefits for the American middle class and even proportionately larger benefits for moderate-income Americans.
Wal-Mart could do even more good for District residents if these four new stores sold guns. That would quintuple the number of firearms retailers in the District, make self-defense affordable for low-income residents, and might just add some lobbying heft to the campaign to roll back D.C.’s ridiculous gun regulations.
The Feds’ Squeeze on Farmstead Cheese
This weekend the Washington Post and New York Times took a closer look at a development mentioned in this space a while back and in a related Cato audio, namely growing federal pressure on small producers of artisan and farmstead cheeses. Here’s the Post:
….artisanal cheesemakers, and their boosters in the local-food movement, say they are being unfairly targeted. They say the FDA does not understand their craft and is trying to impose standards better suited for industrial food companies. …
Listeria is ubiquitous in the environment, but the FDA has a zero-tolerance rule for it in ready-to-eat food such as cheese. If the bacteria are present, the food is considered adulterated and cannot be sold. Some countries, including cheese-loving France, tolerate minute amounts of listeria in food.
Why can’t we in America enjoy at least as much freedom at our dinner tables as the French?
Many artisan cheese producers favor the use of raw (unpasteurized) milk and the rules on that subject are coming in particular to (as it were) a non-boil. The Food and Drug Administration has long required that cheeses made from raw milk be aged for 60 days in hopes of killing all potentially harmful bacteria. Trouble is, it’s been known for a while that 60 days is not long enough to guarantee that the survival rate of such bacteria is 0.00000 percent. Here’s the Times:
The F.D.A. has not tipped its hand [on its review of the aging rule], but some in the industry fear that raw milk cheese could be banned altogether or that some types of cheese deemed to pose a higher safety risk could no longer be made with raw milk. Others say they believe the aging period may be extended, perhaps to 90 days. That could make it difficult or impossible for cheesemakers to continue using raw milk for some popular cheese styles, like blue cheese or taleggio-type cheeses, that may not lend themselves to such lengthy aging.
“A very important and thriving section of the American agricultural scene is in danger of being compromised or put out of business if the 60-day minimum were to be raised or if raw milk cheeses were to be entirely outlawed,” said Liz Thorpe, a vice president of Murray’s Cheese, a Manhattan retailer where about half the cheese is made with raw milk.
As Virginia Postrel pointed out the other day in a Wall Street Journal piece, the artisan food folks are relatively lucky: “proponents of small-scale farming are organized, ideological, and well represented in the elite media”. Other producers victimized by overreaching regulation have much more trouble getting their voices heard in New York and Washington. That’s one reason small food producers were able to achieve at least a limited and modest carve-out in the recent federal food safety bill, while small producers of children’s apparel and other craft goods continue to flounder without relief under the impossible strictures of CPSIA.
Speaking of the Times, I think it sums up everything wrong with the world that Mark Bittman has quit his stellar food column to start a NYT politics column that begins with a “manifesto” whose planks include the following public policy proposal:
Encourage and subsidize home cooking. (Someday soon, I’ll write about my idea for a new Civilian Cooking Corps.) When people cook their own food, they make better choices.
Talk about artists in uniform. Also speaking of the Times, reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg quotes me today on Wal-Mart’s nutrition deal with Michelle Obama, which takes a series of changes the giant retailer might well have been considering anyway for market reasons, rolls it together with some long-pursued public policy objectives like getting the opportunity to open stores in big cities despite union resistance, and clothes it all in a First Lady endorsement. Clever, no?
The Ninth Circuit’s Controversial New Class Action Decision
The Ninth Circuit has issued its long-awaited en banc decision in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, a pathbreaking class action seeking relief from Wal-Mart for alleged gender discrimination on behalf of somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million women. The upshot: a 6-5 partial affirmance of one of the most questionable class certification approvals in recent memory.
The case is sparking considerable commentary: see here, here, and here, for starters. Cataloguing all the myriad questionable parts of the 135+ page decision, which range from the standard for admitting expert testimony in support of certification, to the permissibility of so-called “issue classes,” to due process restraints on award of class-wide punitive damages, would take a blog post rivaling the length of the Ninth Circuit’s own monster-of-an-opinion.
Here, though, are a few problems that pop out on first reading.
In Which I Liken Wal-Mart to Josef Stalin
Well, kinda.
In this oped for Kaiser Health News, I explain how the deals that the Obama administration has struck with (some) drug companies, Wal-Mart, and (some) hospitals are “the same old Washington game of bribes, backroom deals, profiteering and protectionism — and a harbinger of what health care will look like if the president’s reforms succeed.”
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s a roundup of bloggers who are writing about Cato research, commentary and analysis. If you’re blogging about Cato, let us know.
- Blogger Melissa Clouthier helps spread the word about Cato’s analysis of Obama’s health plan by posting a video of Cato experts dissecting the ABC special last week.
- David Kirkpatrick examines Obama’s record on civil liberties by quoting Cato scholar Doug Bandow.
- Education blogger Brandon Dutcher links to Neal McCluskey’s analysis of American public schools.
- At the Real Clear World Compass blog, Kevin Sullivan quotes Juan Carlos Hidalgo on the political crisis in Honduras.
- Blogging for Townhall.com, Kevin Glass quotes Michael F. Cannon on Wal-Mart’s support of an employer mandate to provide health care.
- Freedom Politics blogger Thomas J. Lucente Jr. cites foreign policy expert Christopher Preble in a post about the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.
- Writing about the political situation in Honduras, Patrick Murphy draws from Juan Carlos Hidalgo’s analysis on the president’s removal.
- At the Americans for Tax Reform blog, Tim Andrews cites David Boaz’s post that lists the “taxes proposed or publicly floated by President Obama and his aides and allies.”
Why Wal-Mart Supports an Employer Mandate
A couple of years ago, I shared a cab to the airport with a Wal-Mart lobbyist, who told me that Wal-Mart supports an “employer mandate.” An employer mandate is a legal requirement that employers provide a government-defined package of health benefits to their workers. Only Hawaii and Massachusetts have enacted such a law.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Wal-Mart is a capitalist success story. At the time of our conversation, this lobbyist was helping Wal-Mart fight off employer-mandate legislation in dozens of states. Those measures were specifically designed to hurt Wal-Mart, and were underwritten by the unions and union shops that were losing jobs and business to Wal-Mart.
But it all became clear when the lobbyist explained the reason for Wal-Mart’s position: “Target’s health-benefits costs are lower.”
I have no idea what Target’s or Wal-Mart’s health-benefits costs are. Let’s say that Target spends $5,000 per worker on health benefits and Wal-Mart spends $10,000. An employer mandate that requires both retail giants to spend $9,000 per worker would have no effect on Wal-Mart. But it would cripple one of Wal-Mart’s chief competitors.
So yesterday’s news that Wal-Mart is publicly endorsing a “sensible and equitable” employer mandate — i.e., a mandate that hurts Target but not Wal-Mart — didn’t come as a surprise to me. It merely confirmed what I learned in a cab on the way to the airport: Wal-Mart has gone native. That great symbol of the benefits of free-market competition now joins its erstwhile enemies among the legions of rent-seeking weasels who would rather run to government for protection than earn their keep by making people’s lives better.
In 2007, Wal-Mart officially joined the Church of Universal Coverage when it entered one of those countless strange-bedfellows coalitions with the Service Employees International Union. At the time, I criticized Wal-Mart for “self-congratulatory puffery” and “jump[ing] on the big-government bandwagon.” I also criticized then-CEO Lee Scott for spouting economic nonsense. (I later learned that Scott was not amused.)
This is so much worse than that.
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