In Ubaldi v. SLM Corp., No. 11-01320, 2014 U.S. Dist.
LEXIS 38587 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 24, 2014), the plaintiffs sued
student-loan institution Sallie Mae for allegedly imposing
unenforceable choice-of-law provisions on some of its borrowers, as
well as charging improper late fees and "usurious"
interest.
The trial court denied certification on a number of grounds,
including problems with the class definition and individualized
issues that predominated. But I want to focus in on another of its
reasons: the often-underused typicality requirement.
The defendant argued that at least one of the named plaintiffs
(Chanee Thurston) was not typical of the subclass she sought to
represent (the "Usury Subclass") because the interest on
her loans was not usurious. (One loan was arbitrable, and so
excluded from the class; another was below the cutoff; and the
named plaintiff had paid nothing on the remaining loans.)
