In this issue: Courts and authorities—both in the United States and Europe—have muddied the waters regarding various class issues. To try to clear things up a bit, we first asked two groups of authors—Donald Falk, Archis Parasharami, & Marcia Goodman and Jay Himes & William Reiss—to look at the 9th Circuit’s Dukes decision, which conflicts […]

William Monts III, Aug 15, 2011 Class action lawsuits are a staple of private antitrust litigation in the United States. Over the last four decades, they have become particularly prevalent in price-fixing cases involving consumer products in which the number of potentially injured individuals is great but individual damage claims, as measured by the so-called […]

Robert O’Donoghue, Aug 10, 2010 Somewhat fitful attempts at promoting antitrust damages litigation have taken place in the EU in the last several years. These attempts have been stymied to a certain extent by a coalition of disparate, but cumulatively powerful, factors. For one thing, the EU Commission (and also, to an extent, certain national […]

Ruchit Patel, Aug 10, 2010 On July 23, 2010, the English Court of Appeal rejected an appeal brought by Dow Deutschland and others against a 2009 decision of the English High Court concerning the jurisdiction of English courts over damages actions following-on from a cartel infringement decision of the European Commission. The appeal focused on […]

Daniel Crane, Aidan Synnott, Aug 10, 2010 The United States Supreme Court recently held that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 trumps a state rule that forbids all class action relief based on a state statutory penalty. With the Court splitting along ideologically diverse lines, three separate opinions vigorously debated matters of state policy prerogative […]

Donald Falk, Marcia Goodman, Archis Parasharami, Aug 10, 2010 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued a significant decision affirming the certification of the largest class action since the adoption of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23. In Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., a divided en banc court ruled, 6 to […]

Jay Himes, William Reiss, Aug 10, 2010 With its much-anticipated en banc decision in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the Ninth Circuit became the most recent federal court of appeals to address the district court’s role in deciding whether a plaintiff has met Federal Rule 23’s class certification requirements. Like several other federal circuits in […]