Clarence Thomas joins liberal justices in dissent against class action lawsuit limitations

[Valin]

The Washington Examiner

Nicholas Rowan, Staff Writer

June 25, 2021

Justice Clarence Thomas led the Supreme Court's liberals in dissent against a decision limiting the standing of the majority of people in a high-profile class-action lawsuit on Friday.

Thomas, along with Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, pushed back against the conservative bloc of the court, led by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The decision marked a rare aberration for Thomas, who generally votes with conservatives in divisive cases.

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At issue was a case involving the credit reporting agency TransUnion and more than 8,000 people whom the company had flagged as suspected terrorists and drug traffickers. A lower court ruled that the company must pay $40 million in damages after siding with the people involved in the class-action lawsuit.

The court's majority stopped short of completely reversing that opinion. Instead, Kavanaugh wrote, most of the people involved in the suit had no standing, thereby significantly reducing the penalty that TransUnion will have to pay. The company had argued that the lawsuit, which focused on the terms of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, had been incorrectly classified as a class-action lawsuit.

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