Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, No. 11-864: Today, the Court decided a case addressing the class certification requirements of Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(b)(3) following the Court’s prior decision in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 564 U.S. __ (2011). Here, respondents filed a putative class action against petitioners Comcast Corporation and its subsidiaries, raising antitrust claims stemming from Comcast’s purported “clustering” of its cable television operations within the Philadelphia area, which allegedly harmed Comcast subscribers by lessening competition and leading to supra-competitive prices. In seeking class certification, with respect to the predominance requirement under Rule 23(b)(3), the District Court required respondents to show that the antitrust impact could be proved through common evidence, and that the damages were measurable on a classwide basis through a common methodology. The District Court only accepted one of respondents’ four proposed theories of antitrust impact, and then certified the class, notwithstanding the fact that respondents’ damages expert’s regression model did not isolate damages resulting from any one of the four antitrust impact theories offered. The Third Circuit affirmed, rejecting petitioners’ arguments that the damages model did not attribute damages to the antitrust impact theory accepted by the District Court, reasoning that to do so would require reaching the merits of the claims at the certification stage. The Court today reversed, reaffirming that the certification inquiry involves a “rigorous analysis,” and that Rule 23’s requirements demanded a damages model showing that damages could be calculated on a classwide basis under the antitrust impact theory accepted by the District Court, even if that requires inquiry into the merits of the claim.
The Court's decision is available here.