Starbucks Corp. v. Superior Court

Petitioner Starbucks Corporation (Starbucks) petitions for a writ of mandate directing the trial court to vacate its order denying Starbucks’s motion for summary judgment, and to enter a new order granting the motion.

Real parties in interest Erik Lords, Hon Yeung, and Donald Brown (collectively plaintiffs) represent a class of some 135,000 unsuccessful job applicants at Starbucks. They allege that the Starbucks employment application contains an “illegal question” about prior marijuana convictions that are more than two years old. They seek statutory damages of $200 per applicant—a remedy which, by Starbucks’s estimation, could total a whopping $26 million.

Plaintiffs’ lawsuit suffers from two fundamental flaws, either of which provides ample grounds for writ relief. First, Starbucks attempted to disclaim an interest in such prohibited information, and two of the plaintiffs understood Starbucks not to be seeking it. Second, no plaintiff had any marijuana-related convictions to reveal.

Nothing in the statutes in question authorizes job applicants to automatically recover $200 per person without proof they were aggrieved persons with an injury the statute was designed…