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Member, Beacon International Group, Ltd.
The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Comcast Corp. et al. v. Caroline Behrend et al. focused on whether New York-based Comcast violated antitrust law in its strategy of concentrating operations in a particular region.
The plaintiffs sought to certify a class of more than 2 million current and former Comcast subscribers under the federal rules of civil procedure, which permits certification only if there are “questions of law or fact common to class members predominate over any questions affecting only individual members.”
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia had ruled that damages could be calculated on a classwide basis, based on a model presented by an expert witness. The expert acknowledged, though, that the model did not isolate damages resulting from any one theory of antitrust impact.
In its 5-4 ruling overturning the appeals court, the Supreme Court said the appeals court refused to consider Comcast's argument that the class was improperly certified because it said it had “not reached the stage of determining on the merits whether the methodology is a just and reasonable inference or speculative.”
By refusing to entertain Comcast's arguments “that bore on the propriety of class certification, simply because those arguments would also be pertinent to the merit's determination, the Court of Appeals ran afoul of our precedents requiring precisely that inquiry,” the Supreme Court ruled. “And it is clear that, under the proper standard for evaluating certification, respondent's model falls short of establishing that damages are capable of measurement to a classwide basis.”