CEMA-ingly Endless Litigation: Brown V. Old Navy Turns 1-Year-Old

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Washington Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Old Navy, LLC, 567 P.3d 38 (Wash. 2025). In response to a certified question from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the court held that the Commercial Electronic Mail Act (CEMA), RCW 19.190.020(1)(b)—an anti-spam statute enacted in 1998 to prevent spammers from disguising junk mail—prohibits “any” false or misleading information in a commercial email’s subject line. That decision has opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of litigation, with plaintiffs shoehorning false advertising theories into this decades-old subject line statute to pursue whopping statutory penalties of $500 per violation.