We will hear argument next in case 24304 Laboratory Corporation of America v. Davis.

Mr. Francisco.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, two basic principles resolve this case.

First, a class action is just a tool for aggregating claims.

So if an individual plaintiff doesn't have Article 3 standing to bring

his own claim, he can't bring it as part of a class either. That's why LaRoe held that an

intervener has to show Article 3 standing in order to intervene, and as Justice Scalia said,

in Shady Grove, class actions are just another species of joinder.

Second, Rule 23B3's predominance requirement leads to the same result.

If a class is defined to include plaintiffs without Article 3 standing, and as a result,

you need thousands of mini-trials to separate the wheat from the chaff, the Article III issue necessarily swamps any common ones. This case is a perfect example. Plaintiffs who don't want to use kiosks

don't have standing to challenge how kiosks work. Any more than a vegan has standing to challenge

how a restaurant defines a medium-rare steak.

As a result, the Court needs to assess whether each of the 8,000 to 112,000 class members actually want to use kiosks,

and that will necessarily swamp any common issues as the D.C. and First Circuit's correctly held in the rail freight and

ASICAL cases. Plaintiff's only response is to say that courts should assess the merits first

and jurisdiction second. But that makes no sense. What if they lose on the merits? Either the unnamed class members are bound by a judgment

regardless of whether the Court had Article III jurisdiction over it, or the Court has to

determine if it had jurisdiction over each plaintiff in the first place. And that's why courts

have to address the jurisdiction before the

merits, just like in every other case. Plaintiff's rule in contrast assumes either they win or coerce

a settlement. But there's no basis for that heads-I-win-tails-you-lose approach to Article 3. I welcome

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