Political Theory

Re: Class-Action Lawsuits

Autolykos — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:19:55 GMT

By your reasoning, a lawyer couldn't represent both/all of the joint owners of a piece of property at the same time. This would effectively eliminate the legal concept of joint ownership of property. Do I have you right?

Re: Class-Action Lawsuits

Bogart — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:12:21 GMT

A class action is not just in any sense. A lawsuit is one plantiff making a claim against a defendant where the laywer is the advocate for the plantiff. How can one laywer represent more than one plantiff? Answer:He can not do so.

But even if you as a plantiff laywer could get universal agreement to represent all possible plantiffs, the decision to have a class action should be up to the defendent not the plantiff and judge. The defendant is the one who has the clamin for damages made against them so they should be the one to make the decision to run one giant case or thousands of small ones.

Re: Class-Action Lawsuits

Merlin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:59:16 GMT

I agree that representing someone without his consent is to be thrown out of the window. In some cases though consent could be asked by notification, and if the guy does not reply to disallow representation, than implicit consent could be assumed. But this is as far as it could be stretched to accommodate logistically challenging suits.

Re: Class-Action Lawsuits

Phaedros — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:32:15 GMT

It seems to me that you have to look at individual circumstances. In a case where the circumstances were identical over more than one person then a class-action lawsuit might make sense, but that's not really possible is it.

Class-Action Lawsuits

Autolykos — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:28:25 GMT

Reading about this recent US Supreme Court ruling made me wonder about class-action lawsuits in a free-market society. Would they exist at all? Would they be handled differently from how they're handled today? What do you guys think?

My own opinion on this is that class-action lawsuits per se wouldn't exist, because a person wouldn't be legally recognized to represent someone else unless the latter explicitly authorized him to. However, just like property could be jointly owned in a free-market society, so could lawsuits be jointly prosecuted.