Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244, 21 (2003)

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264

GRATZ v. BOLLINGER

Opinion of the Court

sentative for the class in the pursuit of compensatory and injunctive relief for purposes of Rule 23(a)(4), see id., at 61- 69, and found "the record utterly devoid of the presence of . . . antagonism between the interests of . . . Hamacher, and the members of the class which [he] seek[s] to represent," id., at 61. Finally, the District Court concluded that petitioners' claim was appropriate for class treatment because the University's " 'practice of racial discrimination pervasively applied on a classwide basis.' " Id., at 67. The court certified the class pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(2), and designated Hamacher as the class representative. App. 70.

Justice Stevens cites Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991 (1982), in arguing that the District Court erred. Post, at 289. In Blum, we considered a class-action suit brought by Medicaid beneficiaries. The named representatives in Blum challenged decisions by the State's Medicaid Utilization Review Committee (URC) to transfer them to lower levels of care without, in their view, sufficient procedural safeguards. After a class was certified, the plaintiffs obtained an order expanding class certification to include challenges to URC decisions to transfer patients to higher levels of care as well. The defendants argued that the named representatives could not represent absent class members challenging transfers to higher levels of care because they had not been threatened with such transfers. We agreed. We noted that "[n]othing in the record . . . suggests that any of the individual respondents have been either transferred to more intensive care or threatened with such transfers." 457 U. S., at 1001. And we found that transfers to lower levels of care involved a number of fundamentally different concerns than did transfers to higher ones. Id., at 1001-1002 (noting, for example, that transfers to lower levels of care implicated beneficiaries' property interests given the concomitant decrease in Medicaid benefits, while transfers to higher levels of care did not).

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