Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp., 527 U.S. 815, 4 (1999)

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818

ORTIZ v. FIBREBOARD CORP.

Syllabus

Amendment jury trial rights of absent class members, and the due process principle that, with limited exceptions, one is not bound by a judgment in personam in litigation in which he is not a party, Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U. S. 32, 40. Pp. 841-848.

3. The record on which the District Court rested its class certification did not support the essential premises of a mandatory limited fund class action. It did not demonstrate that the fund was limited except by the agreement of the parties, and it affirmatively allowed exclusions from the class and allocations of assets at odds with the concept of limited fund treatment and the Rule 23(a) structural protections explained in Amchem. Pp. 848-861.

(a) The certification defect going to the most characteristic feature of a limited fund action was the uncritical adoption by both courts below of figures agreed upon by the parties in defining the fund's limits. In a settlement-only class action such as this, the settling parties must present not only their agreement, but evidence on which the district court may ascertain the fund's limits, with support in findings of fact following a proceeding in which the evidence is subject to challenge. Here, there was no adequate demonstration of the fund's upper limit. The "fund" comprised both Fibreboard's general assets and the insurance provided by the two policies. As to the general assets, the lower courts concluded that Fibreboard had a then-current sale value of $235 million that could be devoted to the limited fund. While that estimate may have been conservative, at least the District Court heard evidence and made an independent finding at some point in the proceedings. The same, however, cannot be said for the value of the disputed insurance. Instead of independently evaluating potential insurance funds, the courts below simply accepted the $2 billion Trilateral Settlement Agreement figure, concluding that where insurance coverage is disputed, it is appropriate to value the insurance asset at a settlement value. Such value may be good evidence of the maximum available if one can assume that parties of equal knowledge and negotiating skill agreed upon the figure through arms-length bargaining, unhindered by any considerations tugging against the interests of the parties ostensibly represented in the negotiation. No such assumption may be indulged in here, since at least some of the same lawyers representing the class also negotiated the separate settlement of 45,000 pending claims, the full payment of which was contingent on a successful global settlement agreement or the successful resolution of the insurance coverage dispute. Class counsel thus had great incentive to reach any global settlement that they thought might survive a Rule 23(e) fairness hearing, rather than the best possible arrangement for the substantially unidentified global settlement class. See Amchem, supra, at 626-627. Pp. 848-853.

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