Source: https://www.fdli.org/2018/11/un-stacking-class-actions/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 16:48:02+00:00

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Today, it is imprinted in American law that “the right to be free of stale claims in time comes to prevail over the right to prosecute them.”4 The rationale most often incanted for this principle is that capping the right-to-sue “promote[s] justice by preventing surprises through the revival of claims that have been allowed to slumber until evidence has been lost, memories have faded, and witnesses have disappeared.”5 But the principle was not chiseled in stone. The law recognizes exceptions. One applies to class actions. Since the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged an equitable exception to statutes of limitation for members of putative federal class actions: while such a class action is pending, the applicable limitation period is (usually) “tolled” (or “suspended”). This temporary interruption of the running of a statute was adopted to help ensure that members of the class will have enough time to file their own claims independently, should the court ultimately refuse to certify the proposed class.
For years, a creative extension to this exception had been percolating among the lower federal courts. May a class member, once certification is denied, rely on this tolling exception to file a new proposed class action (rather than just her own, personal claim)? In other words, can a member of a proposed class action wait on the sidelines as that earlier lawsuit is underway, let the statute of limitations expire on her own claim for relief, then, if that earlier lawsuit is refused class treatment, rely on the tolling exception to take a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) crack at representing that same class in court? In June 2018, the Supreme Court said no. That ruling has important ramifications in food, drug, device, biologics, and tobacco litigation.
Among the principal goals of the federal class action procedure are efficiency and economy of litigation.6 Unlike other litigation procedures, class actions are designed to afford representation not just to those who participate actively in the litigation (or even just to those who are aware that the litigation is occurring), but also to all absent members of the proposed class as well.7 Once the lawsuit is commenced, and as everyone awaits the court’s decision whether to certify the case as a class action, the unnamed class members “are mere passive beneficiaries of the action brought in their behalf.”8 But all the while, the limitations period could be ticking away. If, for example, the court were to deny class action treatment, but do so only after mulling over the issue for many months, the class treatment option would be gone and, with it perhaps, the ability of the class members to press their own timely claims for relief. Waiting for the class action to efficiently and economically vindicate their rights may have inadvertently rendered the class members’ own, individual claims untimely and, thus, extinguished.
After American Pipe and Crown, Cork & Seal, the class action tolling exception seemed settled: members of proposed class actions were not induced to file “protective” lawsuits to ensure that, if class certification were denied, they could still timely press their own, individual claims. The tolling exception would protect the timeliness of those claims—provided, of course, the claimants moved promptly once the class certification denial was announced.
The idea of re-purposing this tolling exception to permit claimants to file a subsequent new class action—rather than just their own, individual claims—quickly acquired a devoted following and a vibrant nomenclature (“stacking” class actions, or “serial,” “follow-on,” or “piggybacked” classes). Proponents reasoned that the right to “stack” class actions followed inexorably from the rulings in American Pipe and Crown, Cork & Seal: those decisions preserved the timeliness of a federal claim for relief, and the owners of such claims for relief ought to be able to pursue them with the same array of options that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure afforded any other litigant. And that included Rule 23 class actions. Proponents relied, in part, on recent Supreme Court language that had pronounced that the federal class action rule applies “automatically” in all federal civil actions, so long as the Rule 23 prerequisites are satisfied.13 This argument proved to be a nationally controversial one.
The China Agritech dispute was a securities fraud fight. A first class action complaint on behalf of certain purchasers of the company’s stock was filed in Los Angeles in 2011, at the very beginning of the claim’s two-year statute of limitations. Fifteen months later, the trial court denied class certification, concluding that the plaintiffs had not established that the company’s stock traded in a manner that could permit classwide treatment. A second class action complaint (substantively identical to the first) was filed a few months later, still within the statute of limitations, but it, too, was denied class certification, this time for failing to meet the typicality and adequacy prerequisites to any federal class. A while later, a third class action complaint (also substantively identical to the first two) was filed, but this time the filing came nearly a year and a half after the statute of limitations had expired. The newest class representative argued, however, that the earlier class actions had tolled the applicable limitations period, thus allowing him to bring his still-timely claim, one he now proposed to litigate as a class action. The trial court dismissed this third action as time-barred; the Ninth Circuit reversed.16 Justice Ginsburg wrote for an 8-1 majority.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure permit litigants to propose class action treatment for their claims, provided that proposal is filed timely. The class tolling exception remains in place. Claimants do not need to file their own, personal lawsuits while a proposed, timely-filed class action encompassing their claims is pending. That pending class action will suspend the running of the statute of limitations on all individual claims falling within the proposed class.
For both reasons, and others, the China Agritech prohibition on using tolling principles to “stack” untimely class actions is likely to have important reverberations in food, drug, device, biologics, and tobacco litigation. It is true that this prohibition is unlikely to affect most serious injury claims (because those are likely to remain individual litigations by choice or necessity). For this reason, the well-placed concern that the “stacking” ban could disproportionately impact negative-value claims and claims by unmotivated or resourceless individuals is not likely to be present in any serious injury docket. Elsewhere, however, the prohibition will have ramifications. The prohibition will help to ensure that the long-settled policies behind capping the right-to-sue (locatable evidence, fresh memories, available witnesses, finality and repose) are realized by incentivizing the early filing of class actions. It will also likely encourage more crowded, animated contests at the outset of class litigation for the right to serve as class representative and class counsel. It may even trigger “protective” class action filings, as a failsafe recourse if post-denial applications for amendment or joinder are not liberally welcomed. This much, though, is certain: the China Agritech decision has achieved what triggered the grant of certiorari in the first place. There is now a uniform, national answer to the “stacking” question; the inter-Circuit division on the question is ended.
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Adams v. Woods, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch.) 336, 342 (1805) (“In a country where not even treason can be prosecuted after a lapse of three years, it could scarcely be supposed that an individual would remain forever liable to a pecuniary forfeiture.”).
See Gail L. Heriot, A Study in the Choice of Form: Statutes of Limitation and the Doctrine of Laches, 1992 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 917, 923-27 (1992) (recounting English foundations).
Jr., S.R. Driver, Emil G. Hirsch, & Benno Jacob, Deuteronomy: Age and Authorship of Deuteronomy, Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) (“It is the unanimous opinion of modern critics that Deuteronomy… was, in its main parts, written in the seventh century B.C….”), available at http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5132-deuteronomy#anchor9.
Order of R.R. Telegraphers v. Ry. Express Agency, 321 U.S. 342, 349 (1944).
See Am. Pipe & Const. Co. v. Utah, 414 U.S. 538, 553 (1974).
See Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(a) (permitting “[o]ne or more class members” to litigate “on behalf of all members”).
American Pipe, 414 U.S. at 552.
American Pipe, 414 U.S. at 554.
462 U.S. 345, 350-54 (1983).
Id. at 550-55. See also Crown, Cork & Seal, 462 U.S. at 352-53.
See Shady Grove Orthopedic Assocs., P.A. v. Allstate Ins. Co., 559 U.S. 393, 400 (2010).
See China Agritech, Inc. v. Resh, __ U.S. __, 138 S. Ct. 1800, 1805-06 (2018) (summarizing decisions among federal courts of appeals).
__ U.S. __, 138 S. Ct. 1800, 1805-06 (2018).
See id. at 1804-06 (recounting procedural history).
See Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(c)(1)(A).
China Agritech, 138 S. Ct. at 1807 & 1810-11.
Id. at 1809. The sole objecting voice was Justice Sotomayor’s, who concurred in the Court’s judgment. She wrote that while the Court’s no-“stacking” rule was appropriate given the peculiarities of the federal securities fraud statutory regime, a blanket no-“stacking” rule in other litigation contexts was, she thought, unwarranted. Id. at 1811-15 (Sotomayor, J., concurring in result).
China Agritech, 138 S. Ct. at 1811. In her concurrence, Justice Sotomayor advocated for trial judges to “mitigate the potential unfairness” of the Court’s no-“stacking” rule by “liberally permit[ting] amendment of the pleadings or intervention of new plaintiffs and counsel,” where appropriate, to preserve an otherwise deficient class action. Id. at 1815 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Whether the Majority approves such an admonition is unclear.
See Crown, Cork & Seal, 462 U.S. at 354.
China Agritech, 138 S. Ct. at 1809.
Id. at 1805 (“Because the Smyth litigation [the second of the two timely-filed class actions] was timely commenced, putative class members who promptly initiated individual suits in the wake of the class-action denial would have encountered no statute of limitations bar.”).
See American Pipe, 414 U.S. at 542 & 561 (class lawsuit filed with 11 days remaining on the statute of limitations; individual claimants acted timely because they filed 8 days after certification was denied). See also Crown, Cork & Seal, 462 U.S. at 354 (class lawsuit filed before claims of individual claimants had even accrued; individual claimants acted timely because, once certification was denied, they filed within their limitations period).
See generally In re Rezulin Prod. Liab. Litig., 210 F.R.D. 61, 65–66 (S.D.N.Y. 2002) (collecting cases, observing that “all relevant Court of Appeals and the bulk of relevant district court decisions have rejected class certification in products liability cases”) (footnotes omitted).
Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(b)(3). See generally Amchem Prod., Inc. v. Windsor, 521 U.S. 591, 623 (1997) (“predominance inquiry tests whether proposed classes are sufficiently cohesive to warrant adjudication by representation”).
See generally Amchem Prod., Inc., 521 U.S. at 623–25 (discussing the number and significance of member-peculiar questions in asbestos products litigation, and quoting Rule 23’s Advisory Committee Note that such cases are “ordinarily not appropriate” for class treatment).
See id. at 625 (“Even mass tort cases arising from a common cause or disaster may, depending upon the circumstances, satisfy the predominance requirement,” noting that the text of Rule 23 “does not categorically exclude mass tort cases from class certification, and District Courts, since the late 1970’s, have been certifying such cases in increasing number”).
See, e.g., Lambert v. Nutraceutical Corp., 870 F.3d 1170 (9th Cir. 2017) (consumer fraud and unfair trade practices); North Sound Capital LLC v. Merck & Co., 314 F. Supp. 3d 589 (D.N.J. 2018) (securities fraud).
See id. (“Predominance is a test readily met in certain cases alleging consumer or securities fraud or violations of the antitrust laws.”).

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