The unanimous decision handed down Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court quashing the largest employment discrimination suit in our history should give hope to all Americans, whether their interest is business or justice. In its decision, the high court ruled the class-action suit against Wal-Mart, alleging corporate bias against women in both pay and promotions, was a huge stretch that overlooked individual cases involving individual employees and individual store managers. The suit instead pursued justice in bulk, which is seldom justice at all.

Representing more than 1.5 million women, the suit sought to indict all of Wal-Mart for uniform discrimination policies when, in fact, Wal-Mart’s policy is to leave great latitude to individual store managers regarding employees’ work history, initiative and professional goals. It’s pretty hard to indict the Wal-Mart chain of about 3,400 stores of discrimination practices in a class-action suit when each case ideally should be judged on its merits rather than, say, overarching statistical evidence.

We aren’t denying there is discrimination at some Wal-Mart stores involving managers remiss in their duties. No one would deny that — not even Wal-Mart. And the high court did split along predictable ideological lines as to whether there was significant evidence of discrimination across many of Wal-Mart’s stores. But to lump different people with different work histories and different management styles into one sloppy class-action suit alleging a corporate policy of bias was too much for even the high court’s liberal members to endure.

“The only corporate policy that the plaintiffs’ evidence convincingly establishes is Wal-Mart’s ‘policy’ of allowing discretion by local supervisors over employment matters,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. “On its face, of course, that is just the opposite of a uniform employment practice that would provide the commonality needed for a class action; it is a policy against having uniform employment practices.”

In reversing a decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the high court ruled correctly in what we believe to be the most important business case to face the court the past decade — that of whether this business of class-action suits is fast approaching the point of absurdity, threatening the well-being of all businesses when cases of alleged bias might best be decided on a studied case-by-case basis.

While the court doesn’t necessarily shut the door on class-action suits in the future, it does significantly raise the bar for them, demanding more of plaintiffs than simply jumping on a legal bandwagon and making damning generalities that could cost a company billions of dollars and its very existence.