The U.S. Supreme Court has recently been siding with arguments supported in amicus briefs from business groups that object to overbroad certification in class-action lawsuits against their member companies. The bottom line is claimants actually have to have something in common to be certified as a class.

In Comcast v. Behrend the court ruled 5-4 that a group that included nearly all Comcast non-basic cable television customers in the Philadelphia area did not share enough common attributes to file a class-action suit against the company under anti-trust law. Business Roundtable (BRT) joined the U.S. Chamber and the Securities and Financial Markets Association in a friend-of-the-court brief arguing for a high standard in certifying class-action lawsuits. (See ruling, SCOTUSblog coverage.)

In light of the court’s March 27 ruling in Comcast, the justices reversed and remanded a class-action certification from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Whirlpool v. Glazer. The suit from a putative 200,000-member class claimed defects in Whirlpool washing machines. The Chamber, BRT and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had argued in an amicus brief that the appellate court’s certification failed to respect “the absence of any common question of law or fact that predominates over questions peculiar to individual claimants. The Sixth Circuit’s ruling considerably relaxes standards for class certification” and would dramatically increase class-action exposure of the groups’ members. (See SCOTUSblog coverage.)

The decisions reaffirm the importance of the court's 2011 decision in Walmart v. Dukes, when the justices ruled 5-4 that "the certification of the nationwide class of female employees was not consistent with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a), which requires the party seeking class certification to prove that the class has common questions of law or fact." (Via SCOTUSblog)

Following these recent decision, the Chamber, BRT and NAM filed a brief seeking certiorari in Sears, Roebuck and Co. v. Butler, a Seventh Circuit ruling that certified a multi-state, breach-of-warranty class action in which the only commonality among class members was their purchase of different models of the same brand of washing machine.