Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said that the plaintiffs hadn’t shown that they all suffered a common injury. The plaintiffs claimed that they had, because Wal-Mart’s practice of giving broad discretion to local managers had allowed the company’s mostly male supervisors to discriminate against women nationwide.
But Scalia disagreed. Giving discretion to managers, he wrote, “is just the opposite of a uniform employment practice that would provide the commonality needed for a class action.” Indeed, he added, “It is a policy against having uniform employment practices.”
