Joanna C. Schwartz of UCLA has written The Cost of Suing Business, forthcoming in the DePaul Law Review. Here's the abstract: To listen to the Chamber of Commerce, one would think that class actions are the most significant scourge on business ever conjured up by man. In brief after brief to the Supreme Court, the […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
The CFPB arbitration report found that class actions can return significant sums to consumers. Adding to the literature on that topic, Brian T. Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt and Robert C. Gilbert have written An Empirical Look at Compensation in Consumer Class Actions. Here is the abstract: Consumer class actions are under broad attack for providing little in […]
Prolific class action scholar (and former Scalia clerk) Brian Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt Law has just posted to SSRN an interesting new paper foreseeing and lamenting the effects of his former boss's handiwork in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors (both cases in which I had the privilege of representing the losing […]
Georgene M. Vairo of Loyola Los Angeles haw written Is the Class Action Really Dead? Is that Good or Bad for Class Members? 64 Emory Law Journal 477 (2014). Here's the abstract: Recent Supreme Court decisions have tightened up the standards for obtaining class certification and virtually eliminate class arbitration as well. However, while the […]
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 […]
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 […]