by Deepak Gupta The Eleventh Circuit issued issued a very comprehensive and well reasoned opinion this week on a hot issue in consumer class-action practice: Can a defendants' attempt to "pick off" a class representative moot the class action? Or, as the opinion puts it: "This case presents the question whether a defendant may moot […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
by Deepak Gupta In today's Los Angeles Times, consumer columnist David Lazarus takes a look at the practice of for-profit debt collectors renting out the seal and letterhead of local California prosecutors — the target of a new class-action lawsuit that our firm filed yesterday in federal court in San Francisco. The practice was condemned in […]
by Deepak Gupta Since its inception, this blog has covered the pernicious practice of prosecutors who rent out their name and authority to private for-profit debt collectors. As readers may recall, these debt collectors use official-looking letterhead to threaten consumers who have accidentally bounced checks for household purchases — consumers are told they'll face criminal […]
Rhonda Wasserman of Pittsburgh has written Future Claimants and the Quest for Global Peace, Forthcoming in 64 Emory Law Journal (2014), Here's the abstract: In the mass tort context, the defendant typically seeks to resolve all of the claims against it in one fell swoop. But the defendant’s interest in global peace is often unattainable in […]
On Monday, Brian posted a link to Linda Mullenix's article, Ending Class Actions as We Know Them. But Professor Mullenix has more thoughts on aggregate litigation, appearing in Reflections of a Recovering Aggregationist, 15 U. Nev. L. Rev., (2014 Forthcoming). Here's the abstract: The past fifty years have experienced a radical reformation of civil litigation in […]
by Jeff Sovern The CFPB Monitor blog has a post titled Industry trade groups urge OMB not to approve CFPB arbitration telephone survey about a filing by the American Bankers Association, the Consumer Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable. They "strongly recommend that OMB not approve the proposal because it will not produce information of practical utility […]
Co-blogger Paul Bland, the new Executive Director of Public Justice, was recently interviewed by Media Matters. In an engaging interview in his office Paul discusses his singular career as a champion for consumer rights, the importance of class actions as a means of challenging corporate wrondoing, and the pro-corporate bent of the Roberts Court. It's a […]
by Stephen Gardner The Board of Directors of the National Association of Consumer Advocates adopted the Third Edition of its Standards and Guidelines for Litigating and Settling Class Actions on May 13 (Download here), continuing a tradition of setting high standards for the ways consumer class actions are handled that began with the first Guidelines adopted in […]
Jay Tidmarsh of Notre Dame has written Auctioning Class Settlements, forthcoming in the William & Mary Law Review. Here's the abstract: Although they promise better deterrence at a lower cost, class actions are infected with problems that can keep them from delivering on this promise. One of these problems occurs when the agents for the […]