Supreme Court Reverses Comcast Class Action Case
The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s certification of a group of Comcast subscribers in a class action, in a 5-4 decision Wednesday. Justices Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy said a U.S. District Court was wrong to certify a class of more than 2 million current and former Comcast subscribers for alleged antitrust violations. At oral argument in November in Comcast v. Behrend, the company’s lawyer argued that the plaintiffs’ arguments for class certification relied on a “bunk” economic model (CD Nov 6 p3).
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In the case, the would-be plaintiffs had alleged that Comcast’s practice of clustering its systems in geographic areas led to higher prices for cable service and violated antitrust rules. The high court ruled that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals broke with Supreme Court precedent by not entertaining arguments against the potential class’s damages model, Scalia wrote in the majority opinion (http://1.usa.gov/YDh95a). “Under the proper standard for evaluating certification, respondents’ model falls far short of establishing that damages are capable of measurement on a classwide basis."
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissent that the high court should not have accepted Comcast’s appeal. Comcast sought review of one question: “Whether a district court may certify a class action without resolving ‘merits arguments’ that bear on [Federal Rule of Civil Procedure] 23’s prerequisites for certification,” but the U.S. District Court granted review of a different question when it agreed to take the case, they wrote. The Supreme Court’s rephrasing of the question “shifted the focus of the dispute from the District Court’s Rule 23(b)(3) analysis to its attention (or lack thereof) to the admissibility of expert testimony,” the dissent said. Comcast is “pleased that the Supreme Court found that a class should not have been certified in this case,” said a spokeswoman.
The U.S. District Court ultimately decided to evaluate a third question -- whether the would-be class-action litigants “failed to show that the case is susceptible to awarding damages on a class-wide basis,” the dissent said. “Abandoning the question we instructed the parties to brief does ‘not reflect well on the processes of the Court’,” they wrote. “And by resolving a complex and fact-intensive question without the benefit of a full briefing, the Court invites the error into which it has fallen.”