Supreme Court Refuses to Decide Whether Damages Class Containing Both Injured and Uninjured Members Can Be Certified

On June 5, 2025, in Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings v. Davis, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed as improvidently granted a case presenting the question of whether a certified class properly may include both injured and uninjured class members.

The plaintiffs alleged that Labcorp’s appointment kiosks violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because they were not accessible to blind patients. The district court certified a class that consisted of all blind individuals in California who visited a Labcorp facility and were denied equal enjoyment of the services because of the lack of accessibility of the kiosks. After Labcorp sought leave to appeal, the district court modified the class definition to include those blind individuals who, due to their disability, were unable to use Labcorp’s kiosks. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the class certification, ruling the class can contain uninjured members, even if the number of them is more than de minimis.

Notably, Justice Kavanaugh dissented from the dismissal. He suggested the court dismissed the appeal “presumably” because it did not “want to deal with plaintiffs’ threshold mootness argument” regarding Labcorp’s failure to appeal the second class certification order modifying the class definition. He stated that he would have answered the question presented and hold that “[f]ederal courts may not certify a damages class under Rule 23 when, as here, the proposed class includes both injured and uninjured class members.” His reasoning was concise and clear:

Rule 23 and this Court’s precedents make this a straightforward case. Rule 23 authorizes damages class certification only when common questions of law and fact predominate. A damages class consisting of both injured and uninjured members does not meet that requirement. As the Government succinctly and correctly stated at oral argument, ‘if there are members of a class that aren’t even injured, they can’t share the same injury with the other class members.’

Justice Kavanaugh noted that some courts have suggested a de minimis exception when there is a de minimis number of uninjured class members. But this case, in his view, did not raise that question because the Ninth Circuit ruled that a class may be certified even when it potentially includes “more than a de minimis number of uninjured class members.”