Originally Posted by Midtowner

The point of all of this is the "clean hands" doctrine. The clean hands doctrine requires a plaintiff in equity to approach the court with clean hands. In other words, if the plaintiff is in a hole and he wants the court to dig him out of it, the hole cannot be of the plaintiff's own making.

This is significant because the remedies sought in both cases are equitable, so the plaintiffs, if they have acted in a bad manner could very well have torpedoed themselves.