On April 16, the NAM filed an amicus brief urging the 6th Circuit to affirm a lower court dismissal of a no-injury class action. The plaintiffs in this case instituted a putative class action against Whirlpool in the Western District of Michigan alleging that the company engaged in fraud and violated various state consumer protection laws by selling ranges without disclosing a latent product defect—control knobs susceptible to unintentional actuation that create a risk of hazardous conditions. Although the district court agreed with the plaintiffs that their “benefit of the bargain” theory of harm—that they would have paid less for the ranges or purchased another brand had they known of the alleged defect—established the requisite injury necessary to support standing to sue, the court granted Whirlpool’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The court concluded that the plaintiffs failed to allege that Whirlpool had presale knowledge of the safety risk presented by the defect, a necessary element of the plaintiffs’ claims. The plaintiffs appealed that decision to the 6th Circuit.
We explain in our amicus brief that to state a claim and establish a concrete injury to support Article III standing, plaintiffs must allege that they were harmed by the alleged defect. Claims of injury premised on an overpayment for a product require plaintiffs to provide an objective measure against which their claims may be measured. The plaintiffs here, however, do not specify the value of the range they contend they bargained for versus the value of the range they actually received, i.e., how much the ranges diminished in value to them given the knobs’ “defect.” We further argue that enforcing the pleading standards will prevent plaintiffs from masking their allegations of product defect as consumer fraud class actions.