Government Class Actions After Jennings v. Rodriguez

by Maureen Carroll, Alexandra D. Lahav, David Marcus & Adam Zimmerman

This post is excerpted from the Harvard Law Review Blog.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Jennings v. Rodriguez raised the momentous question of whether the government can indefinitely detain people without a hearing. If the government has its way, the case also may close the courthouse doors to a wide array of class actions long used to challenge unlawful government action.

In Jennings, the Court, in an opinion by Justice Alito, ruled that the government did not have to offer detained immigrants bond hearings under the Immigration and Nationality Act. But the Court declined to address a related issue—whether denying bond hearings would violate due process. Instead, the Court sent the case back to the Ninth Circuit to address that question first.

But the Court didn’t stop there. At the end of the majority opinion, the Court also invited the Ninth Circuit to consider whether plaintiffs could bring a class action at all for their due process claim. In so doing, the Court asked whether individual differences between plaintiffs prevented courts from certifying class actions in due process cases, just as they did in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, a multi-billion dollar damage class action decided by the Supreme Court seven years ago.

Read the complete post here.

Prof. Zimmerman Urges Veterans Court to Use Class Actions Before Adopting Formal Rule

By Professor Adam Zimmerman
Gerald Rosen Fellow

I was among those who filed an amicus brief--on behalf of the nation's leading scholars in administrative law, federal courts and civil procedure--in Veteran's Court today arguing how it may conduct class actions.

By way of background, in April, the Federal Circuit issued a pathbreaking decision holding that veterans could bring class actions in veterans courts, reversing over 30 years of precedent. Before that, veterans groups lacked meaningful ways to challenge systemic problems at the VA. Relying, in part, on our earlier amicus brief and our research in Inside the Agency Class Action, 126 Yale L.J. 1634 (2017), the Federal Circuit concluded that the nation's veterans courts indeed had power to hear class actions to improve efficiency, consistency and fairness in their own proceedings.

As a result, the veterans court has now begun to consider adopting formal rules to aggregate cases, including class actions. At the same time, veterans groups have already started filing class actions. So, the Veterans Court invited amici, including us, to weigh in on whether it can hear class actions before it adopts a formal rule to do so. Because formal rules often take several years to complete, how the veterans court proceeds now could have a dramatic impact on the speed in which it is able to provide justice for thousands of the nation's veterans.

Our brief, written with the Yale Law School Veterans Legal Services Clinic, surveys a range of different courts--federal courts, legislative courts and administrative tribunals--to show how they have experimented with class actions. In so doing, we show how many different courts gained invaluable experience, and swiftly resolved large numbers of pending cases, by adopting aggregate procedures, on a case by case basis, before adopting a formal rule to do so.

Some Thoughts on Microsoft v. Baker

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

The big story in Microsoft v. Baker -- the Supreme Court's latest decision involving class actions -- is the question it did not reach today: Do lead plaintiffs have standing to continue pursuing a class action after their individual claims go away?

By way of background, there were two issues in Microsoft v. Baker. The one most people are familiar with is a highly technical question. Whether the plaintiff's strategy in the case--which was to voluntarily dismiss the case with prejudice in order to appeal the denial of class certification--is an impermissible end-run around Rule 23(f)? Rule 23(f) was created nearly two decades ago to permit appellate courts to review whether or not a district court properly certified a class action. Because the decision to certify a class action -- or not -- was so momentous, before Rule 23(f), a grant often would result in a quick settlement, while a denial would often spell the "death knell" of the case. The class action rules were amended in 1998 to give the appellate courts power to hear class action cases in their discretion, even though the appellate courts usually won't hear a case until after the lower court issues a final judgment. Microsoft involved what the Court felt was an improper workaround that process. Rather than rely on 23(f), plaintiffs could voluntary dismiss their claims, receive a final judgment and then appeal the denial of class certification.

The New Class Action Regluators

Professor Adam Zimmerman presented at the University of Kansas' 50th Anniversary Perspectives on the Modern Class Action. An excerpt from his presentation, "The Intersection of Agencies and Class Actions," appears below.

Federal agencies have quickly become some of the most important regulators of class actions and court access—particularly as stalemates, splits and institutional constraints limit the Supreme Court and federal rules committees from reforming class actions. But we have yet to appreciate how powerful agencies really are in regulating court access or what, if anything, courts should do about it.

 
Agencies have many different tools to regulate class actions, and in turn, private enforcement of law. Relying on varying degrees of authority—statutes, funding, licensing and litigation positions—agencies can enable, disable or de-stablize litigation.

First, agencies may enable litigation in several ways. They may bar companies from mandating arbitration with others; create evidentiary presumptions or require disclosures that minimize the number of individual issues required to group together cases in federal courts; and they may even hear class actions and other kinds of aggregate litigation, themselves, reducing backlogs and improving opportunities for judicial review. 

Should the Education Department Hear Class Actions when Colleges Collapse?

By: Professor Adam Zimmerman

This op-ed originally appeared on RegBlog.

Last month, ITT Educational Services—one of the nation’s largest for-profit colleges—announced that it was shutting its doors in the wake of several state and federal fraud investigations. The closure comes as the U.S. Department of Education cracks down on shady colleges that lure unwitting students with false promises of money and jobs. But behind the controversy over “predator schools” lies a more vexing problem: how the government will handle thousands of claims by ITT’s former students seeking federal loan forgiveness.

Federal law has long entitled students to federal loan forgiveness when they are left in the lurch by colleges that commit fraud or go bankrupt. The principle behind this rule is that students are doubly punished when they rack up crippling debt in schools that can never provide them with a marketable degree. But after the closure of Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit educational institution that collapsed two years ago under similar circumstances to those involving ITT, the backlog of claims brought by students seeking debt relief from the Education Department swelled to over 25,000. If another 30,000 ITT students go down the same road, it could be years before the Department decides whether these students are entitled to relief under federal law. As important, no existing process ensures that students with similar claims will be treated in the same way and that independent experts will make these determinations.

Agency Class Actions In Action

The Administrative Conference of the United States voted to approve recommendations written by Professor Adam Zimmerman for almost all federal agencies. The recommendations, co-authored by Michigan State's Michael Sant'Ambrogio, recommend that federal agencies use class actions and other complex procedures in their own hearings.

Zimmerman says:

"Because agencies hear far more cases than federal and state courts, this is a big deal--for injured veterans, coal miners, consumers and others long denied the use of these kinds of procedures to commence and resolve their cases. Our recommendations will be published in the federal register and apply to all federal agencies that adjudicate claims."

• Read the full report here.
• Read the recommendations here.

Zimmerman’s Amicus Brief Cited in Supreme Court Case over Class Action Certification

Professor Adam Zimmerman's amicus brief Complex Litigation Law Professors in Support of Respondents: Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo is cited in the Supreme Court slip opinion in the case.

Tyson Foods involved whether and how plaintiffs could use statistics in class actions. In doing so, the court relied on the amicus brief Zimmerman wrote with Professor Sergio Campus on behalf of complex litigation scholars. The brief explains the many ways statistics are used as evidence in complex litigation -- and cautions against a broad opinion barring their use. In its opinion, the majority cited the brief:

It follows that the Court would reach too far were it to establish general rules governing the use of statistical evidence, or so-called representative evidence, in all class action cases. Evidence of this type is used in various substantive realms of the law. Brief for Complex Litigation Law Professors as Amici Curiae 5–9; Brief for Economists et al. as Amici Curiae 8–10. Whether and when statistical evidence can be used to establish classwide liability will depend on the purpose for which the evidence is being introduced and on “the elements of the underlying cause of action,” Erica P. John Fund, Inc. v. Halliburton Co., 563 U. S. 804, 809 (2011)."

Read the full brief below.

Wall Street Journal References Prof. Zimmerman's Amicus Brief in Class Action Battle

Professor Adam Zimmerman was one of two primary authors for an amicus brief written on behalf of top federal court, complex litigation and administrative law scholars from around the country. The brief advances arguments made in article written in the Columbia Law Review, The Agency Class Action, 112 Colum. L. Rev. 1992 (2012). It was referenced in a Wall Street Journal story about the case.

Chevron After King v. Burwell

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

Prof. Zimmerman is guest blogging on Prawfsblawg, where this post originally appeared.

As Richard already observed today, in King v. Burwell, the Court upheld the government's interpretation of the Affordable Care Act to allow people to get subsidies on healthcare exchanges created by the federal government. Chris Walker has a nice post at JREG discussing the case.   

I agree with Chris that the way the Court reached today's outcome could have broader consequences for administrative law.  I offer some very, tentative off-the-cuff thoughts about the opinion below the fold.

 

Aggregate Agency Adjudication

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

Prof. Zimmerman is guest blogging on Prawfsblawg, where this post originally appeared.

At Yale's Journal on Regulation, Chris Walker highlights our project on Aggregate Agency Adjudication with the Administrative Conference for the United States. Michael Sant’Ambrogio and I are studying agencies that experiment with class actions, trials by statistics, and other aggregate litigation techniques to resolves lots of cases in their own courts. As we discuss in The Agency Class Action, 112 Colum. L. Rev. 1992 (2012), agencies don't do this very often. And there are lots of reasons why. But, we want to see if agencies can use aggregate adjudication along with other tools -- rulemaking, informal guidance, stare decisis and ADR -- to resolve cases more effectively.

I've already described Medicare's new pilot plan to use "trials by statistics" to alleviate its 500,000+ case backlog. So, here's another example: the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress created this program in the 1980s to provide people injured by vaccines with a no-fault alternative to lawsuits in federal court. In theory, an "Office of Special Master" must decide whether to compensate someone in 240 days based on a showing that the vaccine caused the injury. But see Nora Freeman Engstrom, A Dose of Reality for Specialized Courts: Lessons from the VICP, 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. _ (forthcoming 2015) (finding, among other things, that it takes longer than that). Many claims proceed one at a time, like most benefit programs. But when over 5,000 parents claimed that a vaccine additive, called Thimerosal, caused autism in children, the Vaccine Program used three “omnibus proceedings" to pool together all the individual claims that raised the same highly contested scientific questions in front of just three adjudicators. As it happens, the Vaccine Program has used coordinated proceedings like this for more than 20 years.

Even though the Act that created the vaccine program contains no provision for class action suits or anything like it, the program developed the concept of the omnibus proceeding on its own because the "same vaccine and injury often involve the same body of medical expertise." Counsel representing large groups of individual claimants often use an omnibus proceeding to answer questions of "general causation," like whether a particular vaccine is capable of causing a specific injury. The issue of whether it did so in a specific case can then be resolved more expeditiously. I'll provide a few more details about this process below, but can you think of other agencies that assign large groups of individual similar cases to the same adjudicator for similar reasons? What are strengths and weaknesses of this kind of approach? The Vaccine Program uses two types of omnibus proceedings. The first involves common vaccines and injuries--applying evidence developed in the context of one or more individual cases to other cases involving the same vaccine and the same or similar injury. See, e.g., Capizzano v. Sec’y, HHS, 440 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2006). The second involves hearing evidence on a general theory of causation--like does a rubella vaccine cause chronic arthritis or other categories of joint problems? The special master makes findings based on that evidence and orders the parties to file papers establishing the extent to which the facts of individual cases fit within the courts general findings. See, e.g., Ahern v. Sec’y, HHS, No. 90-1435V, 1993 U.S. Claims LEXIS 51 (Fed. Cl. Spec. Mstr. Jan. 11, 1993). For example, counsel representing a large number of petitioners and counsel for respondent may file expert reports and medical journal articles to support the theory that the rubella vaccine is associated with chronic arthritis. The special master then (1) conducts a hearing in which the medical experts testify, (2) publishes an order setting forth the conclusions, and (3) files it in each of the rubella cases. If he finds sufficient evidence that the rubella vaccination could cause chronic arthropathy under certain conditions, he may order individual petitioners seeking compensation to establish those conditions in a separate filing.

According to one special master, however, most omnibus proceedings work like bellwether trials in federal district court--organizing individual cases that raise similar issues in front of the same adjudicator, in the hopes that a big outcome settles aspects of the remaining cases:

Most omnibus proceedings ... have involved hearing evidence and issuing an opinion in the context of a specific case or cases. Then, by the agreement of the parties, the evidence adduced in the omnibus proceeding is applied to other cases, along with any additional evidence adduced in those particular cases. The parties are thus not bound by the results in the test case, only agreeing that the expert opinions and evidence forming the basis for those opinions could be considered in additional cases presenting the same theory of causation.

The use of the omnibus proceeding is thus less binding than the "all-or-nothing" approach of the class action. But there are some drawbacks. First, some agencies, even if they wanted to, may not be able to adopt omnibus proceedings like the Vaccine Program. Many agencies use administrative law judges, who are assigned randomly to each individual case to minimize bias and to prevent gamesmanship. Second, omnibus proceedings raise interesting questions about the legitimacy of using an adjudication process to settle complex scientific questions. Not only were many plaintiffs in the autism proceedings anxious about commencing cases together, so were members of the public heath community, who "found it unsettling that the safety of vaccines must be put on trial before three "special masters"" in an obscure vaccine court. Said one: "the truth about scientific and medical facts is not, ultimately, something than can be decided either by the whims of judges or the will of the masses."

To be fair, however, those concerns aren't unique to mass litigation, or for that matter, agencies that rely on rulemaking procedures, scientific panels, or even, the Center for Disease Control to resolve tough scientific questions. And, in the case of vaccines and autism, a significant test for the limited resources of the vaccine program, at least some found that the ability to hear common cases together led to deliberations that represented a "comparatively neutral exhaustive examination of the available evidence." But such concerns still raise the question about the best way to efficiently and consistently pool information about many common claims without sacrificing legitimacy, compromising due process, or magnifying the risk of error.

The Bellwether Settlement

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

Prof. Zimmerman is guest blogging on Prawfsblawg, where this post originally appeared.

A curious thing is happening in a Bergen County court in New Jersey. A set of trials scheduled to go forward this summer were resolved through an unusual settlement process. In a case that involved more than 3,000 defective hip-implants, the parties reached a $1 billion global settlement in record time, using what the court described as an unprecedented series of "bellwether settlements."

By way of background, courts have used "bellwether trials" for a long time to resolve large numbers of similar lawsuits. In a bellwether trial (or trials), the parties select a small group of cases for jury trial out of a large group of similar claims. A steering committee of plaintiff and defense counsel then use information gleaned from trial outcomes to resolve the remaining cases. Bellwether trials have been used to resolve many high profile cases--perhaps most famously in the Vioxx litigation against Merck and, most recently, in GM's litigation over its defective ignition switches.

But instead of "bellwether trials," the court facilitated a system of "bellwether settlements." That is, rather than use juries to decide the merits and value of certain cases, the parties--supervised by the court, magistrates and special masters--relied on a structured sample of 21 mediations involving typical plaintiffs to forge a global settlement. It was hoped that the different settlement outcomes, much like a bellwether trial, would offer the parties crucial "building blocks"--providing critical information about how to globally resolve the remaining cases. And Judge Martinotti, the New Jersey judge designated to handle all of the cases, was incredibly successful. The process not only resolved more than 2,000 lawsuits in New Jersey state court, but another 1,000 pending lawsuits in federal multidistrict litigation, all in one fell swoop.

A few thoughts beneath the fold.

Mass Compensation After September 11

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

Prof. Zimmerman is guest blogging on Prawfsblawg, where this post originally appeared.

Thanks to everyone for having me this month. For those of you who don’t know me, I write about complex litigation, mass torts and administrative law. Lately, I've been writing a lot about the issues that come up when mass disputes appear in unusual places—like administrative adjudication and agency settlements, federal prosecution agreements, private corporations, and even, the Presidency.

Despite some personal experience with it, I haven’t written much about the mass litigation that followed September 11. (But see here). However, in the last few weeks, we've crossed two small milestones for thousands of recovery workers who claim they suffered toxic injuries at Ground Zero. The first was announced by Sheila Birnbaum, the administrator of the new September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which Congress reopened to pay claims brought by first responders. After three years overseeing the Fund, Birnbaum announced that she had resolved $1 billion dollars worth of claims for over 4,400 first responders.