Last week, I was quoted in an article in Competition Law360 (subscription) on the Ninth Circuit's unpublished opinion in Brazil v. Dole Packaged Foods, LLC, 2016 WL 5539863 (9th Cir. Sept. 30, 2016).
The article begins:
Consumers won a major false advertising battle Friday when the Ninth Circuit ruled the label on Dole's "all natural" frozen berry products may be misleading, but the panel's finding that the decertified class hadn't shown it could prove classwide damages greatly limits what the buyers can recover if they ultimately prevail, attorneys say.
As I told the reporter, I think the opinion mistakenly assumes that there are only two ways to measure UCL restitution, which is not the law in California. Also, the class certification portion of the opinion seems to me inconsistent with Pulaski & Middleman, LLC v. Google, Inc., 802 F.3d 979 (9th Cir. 2015) (discussed in this blog post). The analysis assumes that every unnamed class member would have to show that they were misled, which is inconsistent with both Pulaski and In re Tobacco II Cases, 46 Cal.4th 298 (2009), which this opinion does not cite (it cites only the more recent Tobacco II opinion on remand, discussed here). This non-precedential opinion should be limited to its facts.
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