BREAKING NEWS Duran v. U.S. Bank: Petition for Review Granted

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The California Supreme Court has granted the Petition for Review in Duran v. U.S. Bank National Ass’n, No. S200823 (Cal. May 16, 2012) (order granting petition for review).  The docket is available here.  All seven Justices voted in favor of review.

Many observers saw the proverbial writing on the wall for Duran with the Supreme Court’s Brinker decision, which endorsed the type of sampling and statistical methods received skeptically in Duran. As the Brinker concurring justices noted, without statistical evidence, many class actions would be, as a practical matter, virtually impossible to pursue. See Brinker Restaurant Corp. v. Super. Ct., No. S166350 (Cal. Apr. 12, 2012) (Werderger, J., concurring).

Duran was widely criticized in the Petition for Review and amicus letters for encroaching on trial courts’ autonomy and was held up as an exemplar of the maxim that “bad facts make bad law,” as even advocates of statistical methods were critical of the particular methods deployed by the Duran plaintiffs. With the grant of review, Duran is rendered “depublished.”