Class actions aren't about justice for individual plaintiffs. Hell, lawsuits in general aren't about getting justice for plaintiffs. In wrongful death cases, the courts can't wave their hands and bring the dead back to life. Money is used as an imperfect substitute. X died, and amount Y is what their life would have been worth. Not because people want to boil away everything that made that life what it was into a dollar amount, but because there's really no other option. That's not the same as an idealized sense of "justice" that people talk about when they state their intentions to "have their day in court."
Attorneys don't push for settlements because they're greedy or unethical; they try to settle because it's almost always better than litigating. Litigation is risky, and even strong claims can lose at trial. Neither side wants to roll the dice.
Class actions are almost exclusively about leveraging the individual class members into a means of stopping a given behavior rather than achieving significant compensation for them. And in most cases, you'll find that the behavior's effects are relatively limited on an individual basis, but significant when considered in aggregate.
Litigation is expensive. When you're looking at a case where litigating your claim can cost you well over 500k if you're very lucky, even significant awards can amount to nothing more than Pyrrhic victories. Even your average punitive damages, when they're granted, aren't necessarily sufficient to push you into the black.
In this case, it's highly unlikely that any individual plaintiff could ever prove damages in excess of their legal costs. Individually, it's unlikely for the class members to come out ahead even assuming they're able to litigate in the first place. And they're damned sure unlikely to be able to change the behavior as a result.
It's easy to complain about class actions but those complaints have to be put in perspective. Environmental law alone would be sufficient to prove my point. In any case, I'd recommend this for a pretty well-balanced and fair primer to class actions (it's focused on procedure, but I think that's a good thing for this purpose):
Comments
Class actions aren't about justice for individual plaintiffs. Hell, lawsuits in general aren't about getting justice for plaintiffs. In wrongful death cases, the courts can't wave their hands and bring the dead back to life. Money is used as an imperfect substitute. X died, and amount Y is what their life would have been worth. Not because people want to boil away everything that made that life what it was into a dollar amount, but because there's really no other option. That's not the same as an idealized sense of "justice" that people talk about when they state their intentions to "have their day in court."
Attorneys don't push for settlements because they're greedy or unethical; they try to settle because it's almost always better than litigating. Litigation is risky, and even strong claims can lose at trial. Neither side wants to roll the dice.
Class actions are almost exclusively about leveraging the individual class members into a means of stopping a given behavior rather than achieving significant compensation for them. And in most cases, you'll find that the behavior's effects are relatively limited on an individual basis, but significant when considered in aggregate.
Litigation is expensive. When you're looking at a case where litigating your claim can cost you well over 500k if you're very lucky, even significant awards can amount to nothing more than Pyrrhic victories. Even your average punitive damages, when they're granted, aren't necessarily sufficient to push you into the black.
In this case, it's highly unlikely that any individual plaintiff could ever prove damages in excess of their legal costs. Individually, it's unlikely for the class members to come out ahead even assuming they're able to litigate in the first place. And they're damned sure unlikely to be able to change the behavior as a result.
It's easy to complain about class actions but those complaints have to be put in perspective. Environmental law alone would be sufficient to prove my point. In any case, I'd recommend this for a pretty well-balanced and fair primer to class actions (it's focused on procedure, but I think that's a good thing for this purpose):
http://law.duke.edu/grouplit/papers/classactionalexander.pdf