Althouse: "Feel free to relegate the majority’s decision to the furthest reaches of your mind..."

April 16, 2013

"Feel free to relegate the majority’s decision to the furthest reaches of your mind..."

"... The situation it addresses should never again arise.”

11 comments:

Nonapod said...: I'm a little confused by this. From what I can gather this was regarding whether or not collective actions brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act can be "mooted" because a defendant (an employer) made an offer of judgement (effectively a payoff) that was ignored or rejected. Kagen seems to be saying that she doesn't believe that FLSA collective actions will happen anymore (I doubt that)? Or maybe that employers won't bother to try to reach a judgment to save money? Seems a non sequitur.; 4/16/13, 2:44 PM
Chip Ahoy said...: I don't like her.

But I'm tryyyyyeye-eye-eye-ing.

The sentence before that was, if the majority dummkopfs believes crap about arcane details of labor law that is not true, then ...

go ahead and dismiss them.

[The decision would turn out to be the most one-off of one-offs, explaining only what (the majority thinks) should happen to a proposed collective FLSA action when something that in fact never happens to an individual FLSA claim is errantly thought to have done so.]

Pdf search doc [mind]; 4/16/13, 2:47 PM
Chip Ahoy said...: The individual case was picked out of the collective case then they tried to shift it back to being collective case to avoid lawyers fees. From the bit I read, I had to quit because I was trying and my eyeballs ceased to cooperate.; 4/16/13, 2:52 PM
mccullough said...: This was a well written dissent. But it's premise is flawed. When presented with the issue, the Court will say that when defendants offer to settle for all relief a plaintiff has requested, the case is mooted even if the plaintiff refuses the offer. Kagan says the answer to that question is no. She's wrong.; 4/16/13, 3:04 PM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: Wishing the majority's decision out to the cornfield would be going too far.; 4/16/13, 3:07 PM
BarrySanders20 said...: The ERISA case decided today was better. Better being a relative term.

That one was also nominally 5-4, though 9-0 on the first two parts. No snarky jibes and jabs though.

Just a moral for drafters of employee benefit plans that can be found all over the floors of the London Tube: Mind the gap.

As in, don't leave a gap in the plan or the courts will fill it in for you.

Gap filling is on the minds of everyone, all the time.; 4/16/13, 3:52 PM
hombre said...: No reason why Kagan, her consorts, or anyone else should be troubled by the federal courts' lack of jurisdiction over the subject matter. After all, liberal federal judges are meant to be the ultimate arbiters of all of society's issues, jurisdiction or not.; 4/16/13, 5:29 PM
Patrick Henry was right! said...: This dissent shows an alarming absence of judicial temperament. A Judge should be expected to be able to disagree with being insulting and without being snarky. The rule is that offering full relief moots the case, whether it is accepted or not. Good rule that should unclog the court dockets of cases where the defendant knows they messed up.; 4/16/13, 5:41 PM
FleetUSA said...: Ok. Why didn't the woman accept the $7,500 which was full settlement? Ah, yes. The lawyers probably wanted to go on appealing this and wasting everyone's time and money hoping for a big payday in damages, etc.; 4/16/13, 7:07 PM
Richard Dolan said...: By the power of her writing alone, Kagan is turning into a sharp and potentially dominant justice -- perhaps the only one who can rival Scalia. Ginsburg disdains that writing style -- her opinions are typically dry exercises, with all the zip of most law review stuff. But the law advances (and persuades) in more ways, and more powerful ways, than that. A writer who can distill an argument into a phrase like 'the constitution is not a suicide pact' or 'the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race' accomplishes more in one phrase than another judge does with pages of dishwater-dull legalese. Unlike Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor, Kagan can do that (and much more).

She is quite the star. And she will make all the others raise their game, if they can.; 4/16/13, 9:13 PM
cubanbob said...: The court got it right. She brought a suit for damages, tried to get others similarly effected to join but had no takers and the defendant offered her what she wanted. The others who didn't join can still sue collectively or singly, their right to sue hasn't been precluded. The lawyers were taking a businessman's risk and like businessmen, sometimes they lose. This will help keep the bullshit class cases out of the courts. If she simply asked for the $7,500 plus a couple of grand for the lawyer for basically filing the papers she would have gotten it in a heartbeat. The lawyers used her as a trojan horse and they got what they deserved/; 4/16/13, 9:22 PM