The California Court of Appeal Again Chips Away at In re Tobacco II
By David Snyder and Shannon Petersen
Knapp v. AT&T Wireless Services, Inc. (Case No. G043744, May 20, 2011) __Cal.App.4th__, is the latest in a line of recent class action cases limiting the scope of In re Tobacco II Cases (2009) 46 Cal.4th 298. In Tobacco II, the California Supreme Court held that a named plaintiff in a putative class action must have suffered injury-in-fact to bring a claim for violation under the fraud prong of California's Unfair Competition Law (the "UCL"), but that the named plaintiff need not show actual injury to unnamed class members. The court in Knapp held that Tobacco II applies only to standing, and not commonality, which requires a separate analysis. For this reason, the Fourth Appellate District upheld the trial court's order denying plaintiff's motion for class certification, finding that because AT&T Wireless did not make uniform representations to proposed class members, common issues of law did not predominate over individual issues and a class should not be certified under the UCL.
