SCOTUSblog’s Kalvis Golde highlighted a pair of cert petitions filed by HLLI in St. John v. Jones and Yeatman v. Hyland. Each petition seeks Supreme Court review of appellate decisions that permit diverting class action settlement funds to uninjured third party charities.
SCOTUSblog named St. John’s cert the Petition of the Week:
Objecting to one of the chosen nonprofits – the Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice at the University of California, Berkeley – class member Anna St. John challenged the settlement. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(e)(2), courts may only approve a class-action settlement if it is “fair, reasonable, and adequate.” St. John argued that the court’s failure to consider feasible tactics used in other class actions to identify additional class members rendered the cy pres settlement invalid under Rule 23.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit disagreed. Monsanto had argued that further outreach efforts would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and discover no more than a handful of additional affected purchasers of RoundUp. Based on that finding, the 8th Circuit held, the district court acted appropriately in approving the cy pres settlement.
In St. John v. Jones, St. John asks the justices to curtail the practice of channeling large portions of cy pres settlements to nonprofit organizations. Chief Justice John Roberts expressed “fundamental concerns” regarding nonprofit class-action payouts in a case the court declined to review in 2013, and Justice Clarence Thomas did the same in a case the court ducked on procedural grounds in 2018. St. John hopes that a majority of the court shares their interest.