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Will House Resolution 1927 Kill the Class Action?
Since HR 1927 was introduced, there has been an outcry that it will “kill the class action.” In fact, opponents (among them Professors Alexandra Lahav, Samuel Issacharoff (Issacharoff HR1927 Letter),...
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Arthur Miller On Aggregate Litigation
I’ve written before about legal giant Arthur Miller (now with the Lanier Law Firm) and his pessimistic take on modern federal procedure. In the ‘teens, he has largely worried about the effect of...
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How Entrepreneurial Are Entrepreneurial Class Actions?
Plaintiffs’ lawyer-turned-professor Morris Ratner has published a new article on making litigation costs a profit center for class action plaintiffs. You may remember he wrote about this issue before...
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Perfecting the (European) Class Action
Last month, I got to experience what I consider a career highlight: I was invited to speak on “Perfecting the Class Action” at Middle Temple. The spiel I gave would be familiar to readers here (it...
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Classic Scholarship – a Theory of Legal Strategy
One of the things that makes legal academia so frustrating to practitioners (and possibly courts) is that much of it appears to focus on easily-researched questions, instead of the genuinely difficult...
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Forum Shopping in the Ashley Madison MDL Proceedings
As anticipated in our previous discussion of the Ashley Madison data breach litigation, lawyers representing the various putative classes have begun sparring over their preferred venues. The Missouri...
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Practical Rhetoric-Pleading & Plausibility
There’s lots of recent scholarship complaining about how pleading standards have gotten too stringent. Professor Anne Ralph of Ohio State University Law School believes she’s found a solution. In her...
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The Next Decade of Class Actions
A few years ago, I complained that class action scholarship was on the decline, and could improve from, among other things, digging into the actual caselaw out there, and making hard, falsifiable...
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Gomez is not the slam-dunk you think it is
It’s rapidly becoming conventional wisdom that Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez (argued yesterday) is going to be a win for the plaintiffs. Respected academics like Robert Klonoff have stated it, and...
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Highlights from the ABA Institute on Class Actions
Last week I had the good fortune to attend the ABA’s Institute on Class Actions in New Orleans. It’s usually a great combination of legal talent, and it’s noted for the depth and quality of its panels....
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The Ten Most Significant Class Action Cases of 2015
Some years are exciting in class action practice; others are tamer. In general, in any established area of the law, precedent accumulates only incrementally. And, with the modern Rule 23 entering its...
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Campbell-Ewald Co. V. Gomez – Court Leaves Mootness Question Open
As you probably know, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court finally issued its long-awaited opinion in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez. Tammy Adkins & Helen Arnold of McGuireWoods’s Chicago office wrote up...
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The Issues with Issue Certification
Rule 23(c)(4) has been been placed under a microscope in the past few years, largely because of the judicial response to the Supreme Court’s Comcast Corp. v. Behrend opinion, and the Rules Advisory...
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The Problem with Prospective Injunctive Relief
There are several practices in class action litigation that really only work if you squint real hard and accept that, as a practical if not a doctrinal matter, class actions are just “different” than...
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Should MDL Judges Act More Like Class Action Judges?
Class actions are not the only form of aggregate litigation. Multi-district litigation (“MDL”), the process by which large numbers of smaller lawsuits are consolidated before a single judge for...
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Common Overcharges May Not Be So Common
Often, when a plaintiffs’ counsel seek to certify a class asserting a hard-to-prove financial injury, they will rely on a statistics or economics expert to demonstrate that there has been some kind of...
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Objectors: The Defense Lawyer’s Friend
I’ve been busy this week with a number of things, but a few of them, including the upcoming amendments to Rule 23 and prepping for a Strafford webinar on Thursday, have me thinking about the proper...
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Five Takeaways from the Duke Conference On Class Action Settlements
A few weeks ago, the Duke Law Center for Judicial Studies held a conference on class action settlements in San Diego, to discuss best practices in the wake of the likely Rule 23 amendments. Like all of...
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Due Process Arguments and State Court Class Actions
Many class-action commentators (including this blog) spend much of their time focusing on class action in federal courts: what caselaw controls, what arguments tend to work. They spend far less time...
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Tyson Foods and Statistical Adjudication
This past Supreme Court Term included several closely-watched cases. One of the most studied was Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, in which the Court identified at least one area of class action litigation...
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