This was an interesting one actually. My email uniqueness test was failing all of a sudden when I switched to creating my user via FactoryGirl.

I found out that when i did: it { should_not be_valid } Rspec looks at the subject which by default is User.new. this worked when I was creating my user instance that way. so I had to tell it to check the user_with_same_email instead of User.new (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11378546/rspec-uniqueness-email-test-fails-with-factorygirl) hence the change.