Because class actions are brought in the names of only a few representative plaintiffs on behalf of a larger defined group, it happens from time to time that duplicate or overlapping class actions are filed. When this occurs, it normally is necessary to decide which lawsuit (if any) definitively resolves a matter between particular parties. That is the principal issue before us in this case, a class action challenging certain provisions in automobile leases issued by General Electric Capital Auto Lease, Inc. (GECAL) under the Consumer Leasing Act (CLA), 15 U.S.C. § 1667
et seq.
and various Illinois statutes prohibiting unfair and deceptive trade practices. After this case was filed in the Northern District of Illinois in December 1994 at the behest of named representatives Stacey A. Williams and others, the named parties to the lawsuit consented to proceeding before a magistrate judge under 28 U.S.C. § 636(c). The court eventually certified a nationwide class, and the case was resolved when the district court approved a settlement (“the
Williams
suit”). Later, Gwynne Dooner and others filed essentially the same suit as a new class action against GECAL in the Middle District of Florida (“the
Dooner
suit”). GECAL responded (among other ways) by filing a motion in the Northern District of Illinois to enjoin further prosecution of the
Dooner
suit. Still acting for the district court, the magistrate judge (who has since been appointed to the United States Bankruptcy Court) granted the injunction. The
Dooner
plaintiffs have appealed from that order. Before we discuss either the facts or the law relevant to that appeal, however, we must discuss two issues related to our appellate jurisdiction.
Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment,
- U.S. -, -,
I
We first explorе the question whether the fact that this case was adjudicated by a magistrate judge, acting pursuant to the consent of the named class representatives, has any effect on the binding effect of the judgment on unnamed class members. Article III, § 1 of the Constitution creates a personal right in litigants to have their cases heard before an adjudicator whose independence and impartiality is guaranteed by virtue of being cloaked with certain constitutional protections. See
Commodity Futures Trading Comm’n v. Schor,
If, therefore, unnamed members of a class stood in the sаme position as new “parties” to the suit, it would be clear that they could not be bound by a magistrate judge’s adjudication unless they expressly consented to the magistrate judge’s exercise of authority. From a practical standpoint, such a rule would virtually eliminate § 636(c) referrals to magistrate judges in all potential class actions, because it would
de facto
transform all such cases into “opt-in” style actions and fundamentally change the capacity of the judgment (whether the result of full-blown litigation or settlement) to bind both sides in the absence of еxpress consents. This radical result would follow, however, only if unnamed members of a class are properly considered as additional “parties” to the suit. If, instead, they are more accurately regarded as having something less than full party status, the need for their express consent also changes. This is because, not surprisingly, the lack of consent of someone who is not a party to an action does not deprive the magistrate judge of jurisdiction. See,
e.g., United States v. Real Property,
Generally speaking, absent class members are not “parties” before the court in the sense of being able to direct the litigation. See,
e.g., In re Brand Name Prescription Drugs Antitrust Litig.,
One final jurisdictional quirk remains to be considered. The consent form the parties executed on May 9, 1995, contained a section entitled “Election of ■ Appeal to a United States District Court,” which both Williams and GECAL also signed. Until very recently, parties who had consented to having their case tried by a magistrate judge had the additional option of electing at that time to take thеir appeal to the district court; if the parties took that second election, further appeal to the circuit court was available only by way of a petition for leave to appeal. See 28 U.S.C. § 636(e)(4) (1996), deleted by 110 Stat. 3847, 3850 § 207 (Oct. 19, 1996).
Cf.
Fed. R. Civ. P. 74 (1997), abrogated by Supreme Court order,
II
To understand the Dooner plaintiffs’ arguments on appeal, it is necessary to review the substantive claims of the Williams action. The Williams plaintiffs alleged that GECAL had violated the CLA and state law in several ways. First, they claimed that GECAL had failed adequately to disclоse the substantial early termination and default charges in its standard form automobile leases, in violation of 15 U.S.C. § 1667a. See also Regulation M, 12 C.F.R. §§ 213.3, 213.4 (1998). Second, they alleged that the early termination charges under the leases were unreasonable, in violation of 15 U.S.C. § 1667b(b), and that the lessee’s right under 15 U.S.C. § 1667b(e) to demand an appraisal of the residual value of the automobile upon early termination was, as a practical matter, unavailable in certain cases. (Specifically, the Williams plaintiffs complained that although the lessee had 10 days to obtain an appraisal before early termination, the right of appraisal as a practical matter was illusory for cases in which early termination was triggered by lessee default, since GECAL could unilaterally order early termination upon default and then repossess the car.) No class was certified until a settlement had been prepared and submitted to the court, which occurred in July 1995.
*271 At that time, the court provisionally certified a settlement class described as:
all persons in the United States other than residents of Connecticut who, between January 1,1987, and July 21,1995, entered into an automobile lease assigned to General Electric Capital Auto Lease, Inc. (“GECAL”) and written on a lease form prepared by GECAL which bears one of the identification numbers [listed in the Settlement Agreement]....
The court certified the class under Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(b)(3), which meant of course that absentee class members had the right to opt out of the settlement. All class members received notice by mail of the proposed settlement, and were given until November 1, 1995, to opt out or to provide notice of their intent to object to the settlement. Approximately 1,300 class members elected to opt out.
The court conducted a fairness hearing on the settlement on November 29, 1995. On January 4, 1996, it entered an order certifying the class as it had provisionally been defined and it approved the settlement.
Williams v. General Electric Capital Auto Lease, Inc.,
No. 94-C-7410,
The settlement embodied in this Agreement shall apply to all persons in the Class as defined in paragraph 3(a) hereof and shall be in complete and final settlement of all claims asserted in the Actions, and all claims which might have been asserted in the Actions, on behalf of the plaintiffs and the Class against GECAL, its successors and assigns, ... arising out of disclosures made on or in connection with vehicle leases assigned to GECAL, out of the reasonableness or validity of the charges and other terms contained in such leases, and out of the collection or attempted collection of charges imposed under such lease forms, except those claims excluded in paragraph 2(h) hereof.
(The excluded claims referred to those based on representations other than the written terms of the lease, vehicle defect claims, property damage or personal injury claims, and repossession or collection claims not based on the lease. They are not at issue here.) The court’s final judgment roughly tracked this language and ordered that all claims asserted in the action and all claims that might have been asserted in it were dismissed with prejudice (with a similar set of exceptions). The January 4, 1996, final judgment also enjoined all “[c]lass members who did not opt out of the class ... from commencing, prosecuting, or asserting by way of counterclaim or defense against GE-CAL any of the claims dismissed, settled or barred pursuant to this order.”
Given that language, one might wonder under what theory the Dooner plaintiffs began their class action in Florida on July 9, 1996, since they had each signed their GE-CAL lease between January 1, 1987, and July 21, 1995, and thus fell within the description of the class that the Williams court had used. Also, even though they apparently received the required notices about the class, none of them had opted out of the Williams litigation. What distinguished the Dooner plaintiffs was that as of July 21, 1995, the date the court provisionally approved the clаss certification and settlement, none of the members of the Dooner class had yet terminated their leases early or been assessed penalties. (This statement is an accurate description for the named representatives Suzanne and James Harper, Lisa and John Ward, and Dudley Williams — no relation to Stacey Williams of the Williams class — who each paid anywhere from $1,237 to $9,728 in early termination charges only after the Williams settlement. Gwynne Dooner herself, however, appears to be an improper plaintiff despite being the eponymic class representative. Although she claimed in her appellate brief that she was not notified by *272 GECAL until August 1995, her story was otherwise when the Florida litigation began. Paragraph 29 of the amended Florida complaint asserts that “[o]n July 5,1995, Dooner terminated the lease agreement and was assessed early termination charges.” Based on this factual admission, Dooner is identically situated to the Williams settlement class. This utterly undercuts her individual claim because, as of July 21, 1995 (the date the settlement was entered), she had already terminated her lease and she thus clearly fell within the class she claims Williams reached. Yet in both its briefs in this court and below, Dooner’s attorney has ignored the face of the Florida complaint and argued that Gwynne Dooner’s “lease was terminated after the class period closed.” Strangely, GECAL’s attorney did not notice the defect. For the sake of consistency with the district court’s language, we will continue to refer to the class representatives here as the “Dooner” plaintiffs, but the reader should bear in mind that the defect we have noted means that Gwynne Dooner herself is not one of them.)
In September 1996, GECAL moved in the Northern District of Illinois for an order enforcing the final judgment in Williams and enjoining the Florida action. The named Dooner plaintiffs appeared through their attorney to contest GECAL’s motion. They argued that because their leases had not been terminated by July 21, 1995 (the date specified in the order certifying the class), their claims against GECAL had not been justiciable at the time the Williams settlement was approved. Accordingly, they reasoned, any effort to include them in the Williams class or to bind them to the Williams settlement was a nullity. Alternatively, conceding that they received the opt-out notice, the plaintiffs also argued that: (1) the opt-out provided was illusory as to them, and thus inconsistent with due process, since as holders of unterminated leases “they had no knowledge of an early termination claim against GECAL ... much less the value of the claim, or whether they wished to release such a claim”; and (2) they were inadequately represented by the named Williams plaintiffs because of a vague intra-class conflict. The district court rejected their justiciability arguments and entered GECAL’s requested injunction without expressly entertaining the Dooner plaintiffs’ collateral attack on the Williams settlement. The Dooner plaintiffs have now brought their appeal to us.
Ill
In order to rеsolve the appellants’ justiciability argument, we must answer several questions: first, were the
Dooner
plaintiffs included within the class certified in Williams; second, did they have any claim before the court that was justiciable at that time; and third, was the
Williams
court empowered to enter an order affecting any future claims of the members of the
Dooner
class that would not have been ripe for adjudication at the time the
Williams
order was entered. These are all legal questions, for which our review is
de novo.
Compare
In re American Continental Corp./Lincoln Savings & Loan Securities Litig.,
As far as the record shows, each of the appellants before us falls squarely within the class certified in Williams, which included individuals (other than Connecticut residents) who between January 1, 1987, and July 21, 1995, entered into a standard automobile lease prepared by, and аssigned to, GECAL. It is also uncontested that none of the Dooner plaintiffs exercised his or her right to opt out of the Williams litigation. They do not argue that the notice they received was formally insufficient under Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(c)(2), and such an argument would be quite hard to sustain in any event given that some 1,300 people did opt out. We consider below, however, the Dooner *273 plaintiffs’ argument that the notice was “constitutionally” insufficient because a person who had not yet terminated the lease and been assessed a penalty would not know whether she had an early termination claim against GECAL and if she should pursue such a claim persоnally or through the class. For present purposes, it is enough to observe that the Dooner plaintiffs fell within the class description used in Williams.
A somewhat more difficult question is whether the
Dooner
plaintiffs had any claims that were presently justiciable at the time of the
Williams
litigation, settlement, and judgment. Returning to the
Williams
complaint, recall that there were two theories raised under federal law: (1) the claim that GECAL had failed to disclose, in an understandable manner, the substantial early termination and default charges in its standard form automobile leases; and (2) the substantive claims that the early termination charges under the leases were unreasonable and that the appraisal right under the leasе was illusory. We agree with the
Dooner
plaintiffs that there are legitimate questions about the ripeness of the second type of claim in their cases. None of the
Dooner
plaintiffs had tried to terminate a lease, and so it might have béen unclear how the appraisal procedures would have worked for them, or whether the amount of the early termination charge would have been reasonable. These claims arguably never actually arose and thus, as of the time of the
Williams
settlement, were only hypothetically available.
Cf. Highsmith v. Chrysler Credit Corp.,
If that were all we had, then the twin problems of standing and justiciability of future claims with which other courts have grappled might be squarely presented. See,
e.g., Georgine v. Amchem Products, Inc.,
L.Ed.2d 689 (1997) (recognizing, but declining to reach, the justiciability question);
In re Asbestos Litig.,
In our view, the court not only could address the entire suit, but this was the appropriate step for it to take. This conclusion follows from the law relating .to releases of claims. As the Ninth Circuit wrote in an opinion addressing the massive class action settlement of the claims arising from the bond defaults of the Wаshington Public Power Supply System:
[t]he weight of authority holds that a federal court may release not .only those claims alleged in the complaint, but also a claim “based on the identical factual predicate as that underlying the claims in the settled class action even though the claim *274 was not presented and might not have been presentable in the class action.”
Class Plaintiffs v. City of Seattle,
Here, the substantive claims of the
Dooner
plaintiffs are based on the identical factual predicate (the leases and the potential for an early termination penalty) as the disclosure claims that we have noted were properly before the
Williams
court. It is possible that the appraisal procedure and the computation of the early termination payments might be ministerial at any given point in tune. If that were true, then the
Dooner
plaintiffs perhaps could have assessed their potential liability for early termination even at the time of the
Williams
settlement; at a minimum, the range of statutory damages available to individual plaintiffs should have been clear. See 15 U.S.C. § 1640(a)(2)(A). We need express no opinion on these questions, however, because even if the claims were not ripe, they were closely enough related to the disclosure claims that everything could be resolved in the settlement. It is not at all uncommon for settlements to include a global release of all claims past, present, and future, that the parties might have brought against each other. See,
e.g., Fair v. International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc.,
Finally, we turn to the plaintiffs’ due process attack on the adequacy of representation and opt-out notice in the
Williams
certification. The plaintiffs’ claim regarding adequacy of representation, which appeared in their brief in a solitary footnote, is insufficiently developed on appeal and is therefore waived. See
Otto v. Variable Annuity Life Ins. Co.,
The [Dooner] ... plaintiffs had the necessary incentive to read the notice of proposed settlement [in Williams] carefully. The [Dooner] plaintiffs were notified of the terms of the settlement and of the fairness hearing. Further, they were adequately equipped to make a reasoned decision, based on the likelihood of early termination and the costs/benefits of a separate legal challenge, regarding the relative mer *275 its of participating in the class or opting out.
Similarly, in its memorandum decision after the fairness hearing approving the settlement, the district court rejected exactly the same due process claim the Dooner plaintiffs now seek to raise, when it was not persuaded by objector Steven Lawson’s argument that “the notice did not provide information on what early termination charges customarily amount to or how they are determined so as to assist a provisional class member in deciding whether to ... opt out.” Thus, in the end, the plaintiffs’ due process attack on certification is little more than a gussied up version of their justiciability argument, and it fails for the same reason: all of the Dooner plaintiffs had a cognizable disclosure claim at the time of the Williams settlement that placed them on inquiry notice about the entire settlement.
With no justiciability or due process bars standing in its way, the district court did not abuse its discretion in entering an injunction against the Florida litigation. Indeed, it is hard to see how anything less than a comprehensive injunction could have protected the Illinois settlement. No one can say for sure what the settlement would have looked like if GECAL had thought that it was really resоlving only the disclosure claims and leaving open a large number of substantive claims, but it is safe to say it probably would have been different. The Dooner plaintiffs did not sign their leases after the closing date for the Williams class, and thus they cannot avoid class membership that way. Had they wished to take a wait-and-see approach to their individual claims, they could have objected or opted out of the class along with the 1,300 others who took that approach. They did not, and the lower court was therefore well within its authority to prohibit them from re-litigating their claims in another forum. We therefore Affirm the district court’s injunction.