Cite as: 516 U. S. 367 (1996)
Opinion of Ginsburg, J.
ence in the second settlement agreement of an opt-out provision. Ibid.
Addressing the objectors' contention that the proposed settlement was "collusive," the Vice Chancellor recalled that "the settling parties ha[d] previously proposed a patently inadequate settlement," and he agreed that "suspicions abound." Id., at *5. Nevertheless, he noted, the "[o]bjectors have offered no evidence of any collusion," so he declined to reject the settlement on that ground. Ibid. Reducing the counsel fees from the requested $691,000 to $250,000, the Vice Chancellor offered this observation: "[T]he defendants' willingness to create the settlement fund seems likely to have been motivated as much by their concern as to their potential liability under the federal claims as by their concern for liability under the state law claims which this Court characterized as 'extremely weak.' " Id., at *6. In a brief order, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed "on the basis of and for the reasons assigned by the Court of Chancery . . . ." In re MCA, Inc. Shareholders Litigation, C. A. No. 126,1993, 1993 WL 385041, *1 (Sept. 21, 1993), judgt. order reported at 633 A. 2d 370.
Before the Ninth Circuit, Matsushita argued that the Delaware class-action settlement barred litigation of the federal claims raised in the Epstein action. The Ninth Circuit disagreed. Relying on Federal Circuit Court decisions,3 the Court of Appeals held that state courts lack plenary power to approve settlements that effectively extinguish exclusively federal claims. Only if federal and state claims rest on the "identical factual predicate," the Ninth Circuit concluded, could a state-court settlement subsume an exclusively federal claim. It was not enough, in the Ninth Circuit's view, that the discrete federal and state claims stem from the
3 Closest in point, the court said, were Grimes v. Vitalink Communications Corp., 17 F. 3d 1553 (CA3 1994), and Nottingham Partners v. Trans-Lux Corp., 925 F. 2d 29 (CA1 1991). See Epstein v. MCA, Inc., 50 F. 3d 644, 662 (CA9 1995).
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