Teflon Class Action Dropped

On May 1, U.S. District Judge Ronald Longstaff (Southern District of Iowa) signed an order dismissing the Teflon MDL action against DuPont.  After unsuccessfully appealing the court's denial of class certification to the Eighth Circuit, the plaintiffs have thrown in the towel.  [Ed. note---feel free to thank me for resisting the urge to make the "lawsuit didn't stick" pun that will no doubt abound.]

The opinion denying class cert. was issued in December of 2008 and previously was discussed at some length on the Class Action Defense Blog and the MassTortDefense Blog.  The court found that the plaintiffs could not satisfy several of the explicit and "implicit" requirements of Rule 23. The most interesting part of the opinion, at least to me, was this quote from the court's discussion of the insufficiency of the proposed class definition: 

In other words, certifying a class with a weak definition creates more problems later in the proceeding.  If the parties are unable to establish membership in a particular sub-class in an objective fashion at the commencement of the litigation, it is highly unlikely that liability and/or damages can later be established without relying on lengthy, individualized inquiry.

This issue---the inability to objectively determine class membership---seems to crop up regularly in putative consumer classes seeking economic damages only.  Given that consumers' purchasing decisions are highly individualized, it seems logical that a class of consumers seeking economic damages will call for individualized inquiries.  Maybe the class action vehicle just isn't suited to such consumer classes?