In California Public Employees' Retirement System v. ANZ Securities, 137 S. Ct. 2042, 2055 (2017) (CalPERS), the Supreme Court held that the Securities Act's three-year statute of repose was not subject to class-action tolling. Thus, under CalPERS, investors cannot rely on the filing of a class action to preserve the timeliness of their individual Securities Act claims, and must instead separately assert those claims within the three-year statute of repose.

The CalPERS court reached this holding over the strenuous objections of the petitioner, several of its amici, and four dissenting justices, all of whom claimed that the majority's holding would result in substantial inefficiencies as "nonnamed class members will inundate district courts with protective filings" before the expiration of the three-year period. Id. at 2053; see also id. at 2058 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

Three years—the length of the Securities Act's repose period—have now passed since the Supreme Court's decision in CalPERS, providing a milestone to consider whether the petitioner's dire predictions have come to pass. As discussed below, empirical evidence suggests that the CalPERS majority correctly dismissed these concerns, and that federal district courts have not been "inundate[d]" with the predicted flood of protective filings.