Our colleague Stuart Gerson of Epstein Becker Green has a new post on SCOTUS Today that will be of interest to our readers: "More Unlikely Lineups."
The following is an excerpt:
Some critics might claim that the Justices are trying to prove something—that the unlikely alliances that they are forming are confined to narrowly drawn opinions issued to counter criticisms coming from the political arena that extra Justices should be appointed to the Court, or term limits should be imposed. It is, I suggest, clear enough that the Chief Justice is doing a masterful job of promoting restraint and unity, and I've commented to that effect on several recent occasions. However, that aside, it also is clear that the individual Justices are deciding cases according to their independent, personal, jurisprudential views, and are hardly marching in lockstep along two sides of a conservative-liberal divide. The unpredicted lineups in the three cases decided by the Court today firmly illustrate that point.
TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez is a case decided under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which creates a private cause of action by consumers to recover damages for certain actions. TransUnion is a credit reporting agency that compiles and sells consumer credit reports that included, through an add-on product, information as to consumer names that were matched up against a list of terrorists, drug traffickers, and other criminals maintained by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). A class of 8,185 individuals with OFAC alerts in their credit files sued TransUnion under the FCRA for failing to use reasonable procedures to ensure the accuracy of their credit files. It was stipulated that only 1,853 class members (including the named plaintiff, Sergio Ramirez) had their misleading credit reports containing OFAC alerts provided to third parties during the period. The reports of the other 6,332 members of the class were not so circulated.
Click here to read the full post and more on SCOTUS Today.