Hold the Fries; I Want a Workable Class Definition with that Order
In late October, McDonald's finally got the break it deserved when the federal court presiding over the so-called obesity litigation against it refused to certify a class in the case. See Pelman v. McDonald's Corp., 02 Civ. 07821 (DCP) (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 27, 2010). A number of bloggers have already covered the subject admirably, including Sean Wajert. I won't try to rework the ground they've already tilled. But I did think there were a couple of things worth noting about the opinion.
First, although the court began and ended its analysis on the predominance requirement of Rule 23(b)(3), this whole issue could have been decided -- and, arguably, decided more decisively -- on the class definition, which applied to the class period 1985 through 2002. As the court noted, the class was defined as follows:
New York State residents, infants, and consumers, who were exposed to Defendant's deceptive business practices, and as a result thereof, purchased and consumed the Defendant['s] products in New York State stores/franchises, directly causing economic losses in the form of financial costs of the Defendant's goods, causing significant or substantial factors in the development of diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, elevated levels of [LDL cholesterol], and or other detrimental and adverse health effects and/or diseases as medically determined to have been causally connected to the prolonged use of Defendant's certain products."
Slip op. at 15-16 (emphases added).
That, my friends, is a failsafe class. It requires a determination of both causation and the type(s) of injury before class membership can be determined. As I have explained many times on this blog, membership in a class must be objectively determinable at the outset, and a class definition that requires merits determinations to determine whether a person is a member of the class is an impermissible failsafe class. Indeed, if McDonald's were to have won at trial, who would have been bound by the judgment under this definition?
These defects in the class definition are hardly curable. As the court noted, New York's consumer protection statute (Section 349 of the General Business Law) gives a private right of action only to those who have been "injured by reason of" the challenged practices. See id. at 5 n.4, 21, 22-24, 29-30; see also id. at 25 ("no necessary generalizable causal connection is manifest between the consumption of Defendant's products and the development of certain medical conditions"), 28 ("whether or not Plaintiffs' claims -- that they ate McDonald's food because they believed it to be healthier than it was in fact -- are true for any particular person is an inquiry which also requires individualized proof"). Thus, as Judge Denise Cote recently recognized in the Snapple litigation, establishing membership in a Section 349 class would still require individual proof the the representation caused the alleged harm.
The second point that I thought was worth noting is that, although the court correctly decided that this case was not suitable for certification of an issues class, it appears to rely on a numerosity argument to do so. See Slip op. at 40-42. That seems particularly odd to me, given how much of the rest of the opinion is devoted to a discussion of how many issues there are that will need to be proved individually for each class member. Even the Second Circuit -- which previously had approved an issues class in the Nassau County Strip Search case -- has recognized in the consumer fraud/product liability context that the certification of an issues class does not sufficiently advance the ball toward liability to justify certification of those common issues that may exist. See McLaughlin v. American Tobacco Co., 522 F.3d 215 (2d Cir. 2008) ("Certifying, for example, the issue of defendants' scheme to defraud, would not materially advance the litigation because it would not dispose of the larger issues such as reliance, injury, and damages."); accord In re St. Jude Medical, Inc., 522 F.3d 836 (8th Cir. 2008).
McDonald's certainly deserves kudos for prevailing in this bogus class action. But there are many other strong grounds for denying certification in this case besides those that were cited by the court in its opinion.
