In the latest chapter in what is now a twelve-year legal battle, plaintiffs seeking to bring gender-based disparate treatment and disparate impact claims against Wal-Mart with regard to the retail giant’s pay and promotion decisions were again denied class certification in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., No. CV 01-022520-CRB (N.D. Cal. Aug. 2, 2013).  Following the United States Supreme Court’s 2011 landmark ruling in which the Court concluded that plaintiffs had failed to point to a common question capable of resolution across the proposed nationwide class and thus failed to satisfy the commonality requirement of Federal Rule 23(a)(2) (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2541 (2011)), plaintiffs filed a fourth amended complaint seeking to re-define a class of female employees working in Wal-Mart’s “California Regions” that would conform to the Court’s ruling.  The proposed re-defined class, however, was squarely rejected by District Judge Charles Breyer, who found that not only did plaintiffs “continue to challenge four different kinds of decisions across hundreds of decision makers, inviting failures of proof at multiple points in each region,” but further that the amended complaint was “essentially a scaled-down version of the same case with new labels on old arguments.”