On February 13 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco agreed to reconsider whether a huge sexual discrimination lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will proceed as a class action.

The court declared that it would rehear a 2007 ruling by a panel of three of its members, which upheld the decision of a district court to certify Dukes v. Wal-Mart as a class action.  The full appeals court will now revisit the contentious case, originally filed in 2001 by Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart employee in California who alleged that she was denied training to obtain a job with a higher salary because of her sex.  The case expanded to include two million women who have worked at Wal-Mart since December 1998.

Lawyers say that the lawsuit is among the largest class-action sexual discrimination cases in the U.S.  Wal-Mart faces billions of dollars in legal exposure because of the size of the class.

The full article is available here on the Wall Street Journal Website (subscription required).