Starbucks Corp. v Lords & Ors
10 December 2008, Court of Appeal, State of California Fourth Appellate District, Division Three
The Petitioner, Starbucks Corporation, asked the appeal court to reverse the trial judge's refusal to throw out the plaintiffs' claim. The plaintiffs in the original case, Eric Lords, Hon Yeung and Donald Brown, 'represented' a class of 135,000 unsuccessful job applicants at Starbucks and brought the claims against Starbucks for using an employment application form containing an alleged "illegal question" about prior marijuana convictions, in violation of section 432.7(c) and 432.8 of the US Labour Code.
Although the form in question contain a "disclaimer" that the question did not require to be answered if the conviction that was two years old, the plaintiffs contended that the disclaimer was "buried within a block of type", did not specifically refer to the conviction question and was placed near the end of the document. Thus, the argument ran, an applicant might overlook the disclaimer and otherwise reveal their conviction "unnecessarily"!
None of the plaintiffs had conviction and all read the disclaimer and understood that they were not required to answer the question. The 2nd and 3rd plaintiffs answered "I refuse to answer" and "Refuse to answer!" respectively. They did not suffer any damages but claimed that they were automatically entitled to the USD200 claimed because they filled out the job application!
The trial judge ruled there was a triable issue whether "the location of the limiting language on the application, the size of the font in which the limitation was printed, and the location of the limitation within the block paragraph is sufficient to alert a reasonable job applicant".
The court of appeal, while seeing "significant problem" with the placement of the disclaimer (i.e. not immediately following the question), did not allow the plaintiffs to recover because they did not suffer any loss,
"There are practical reasons why Lords' and Young's actual understanding is critical. Without it, there would be nothing to stop them from freely roaming throughout [sic] the state "as knights errant amici searching for deficiencies" where no harm has been caused them or anyone else as a result"
and
"This could create a whole new category of employment - professional job seekers, whose quest is to voluntarily find (and fill out) job applications which they know to be defective solely for the purpose of pursuing litigation. This is not the law of California.?h
