Ignatz on class action lawsuits and why
corporate lobbyists are hard at work toreduce their availability:
So, speaking in terms of interest group politics, the company lobbyists would like to portray the relevant groups as “class action lawyers” vs. “the rest of the nation”. Being (as one part of my practice) a class action lawyer myself, I have a different view. And my view, I like to think, comes not only from being a class action lawyer but from being a consumer, like the other hundreds of millions of my American readers out there. Now, I recognize that class actions are sometimes an imprecise and imperfect way of redressing corporate or governmental misconduct. But until some better way is unveiled and made widely active ? and none has been, so far ? the real question (at least as to class actions against companies) becomes “do you think that corporations are being overdeterred, or underdeterred, from dicking over large numbers of consumers?” If you think that companies are overdeterred, then class actions should be made less available; if you think that companies feel too free to cheat us without real fear of consequences, then you should favor greater availability of class actions. When a company cheats a million people out of 10 or 50 or 500 or even a couple of thousand dollars each, there is of course no real prospect of a wave of individual lawsuits by the cheated. Nor is there any governmental agency that can keep an eye on all such shenanigans. It’s class actions, or nothing. Would you prefer “nothing”?
This Land is Your Land on the European
Social Forum in Florence, the new global movement, the recent arrest of several members of this movement recently, why Italy has a quite
literal Fascist penal code and much more. Too much to summarise properly, go read it now:
The fact is, accusing somebody – not to name names, Silvio Berlusconi – of having cooked books, paid kickbacks, and even corrupeted judges to have controversial business deal go his way is a political act only if there are no grounds for the claim. Accusing somebody of plotting not to overthrow the State but to “conspire to obstruct the action of the Governament and the established economic order” is a political accusation _itself_.