Stockwell v. City & Ctny. of San Francisco, No. 12-15070 (9th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CasePlaintiffs, San Francisco police officers over the age of forty, performed well enough on an examination in 1998 to qualify for consideration for promotion to Assistant Inspector. Plaintiffs filed suit alleging that a new policy of the Police Department abandoning the examination as basis for certain assignments worked a disparate impact based on age. The district court denied certification of a class composed of all San Francisco Police Department officers over forty who had qualified on the 1998 examination. The court reversed the district court's denial of certification for want of commonality, concluding that the district court abused its discretion because it disregarded the existence of common questions of law and fact and impermissibly addressed the merits of the class's claims.
Court Description: Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(f) Class Certification. The panel in an interlocutory appeal reversed the district court’s denial for want of commonality of a request under Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(f) for certification of a class composed of certain San Francisco Police Department officers. The panel held that the district court abused its discretion in denying class certification because of its legal error of evaluating merits questions, rather than focusing on whether the questions presented, whether meritorious or not, were common to the members of the putative class. The panel held that given the interlocutory nature of the appeal, and its consequent limitation to class certification factors only, the panel could not consider the merits questions, even as an alternative ground for affirmance. The panel remanded to the district court to consider in the first instance whether the putative class satisfied the strictures of Rule 23(b)(3), as well as the other prerequisites for class certification.
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