Item — HN Reader

Perhaps it would be a good idea to read the article before commenting like that.

Near the end it has this gem: "...Yale Law School professor emeritus Peter Schuck, the author of Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts. While they can empower the so-called little guy to go after corporate wrongdoers, mass torts are vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation, he argues. Even when everything’s on the up-and-up, they’re “an extremely inefficient way of compensating victims,” Schuck told me. They take a long time to litigate, have high transaction costs (up to 40 percent of the total outlay, according to Schuck), and can lead to unpredictable rewards."

So given the law professor calls class actions (mass torts) inefficient with high transaction costs, what is the opinion "Class actions are cheap and efficient..." based on?

3 comments

Personal experience as a class action litigant and as a lawyer in a class action on both sides.

I don't know why one legal professor's book about a class action by an entire nation involving a weapon of war is relevant to a discussion of wholly civil class actions.

Of course a class action is inefficient for addressing the injuries of war; that should be addressed by diplomacy.

Efficiency is not the purpose of the courts, and especially not of tort law. If we were to make anything about the courts less capricious, I wouldn't start with one of the only tools we have for controlling the evil deeds of corporations.

Don’t these criticisms apply equally (if not more) to the alternative of thousands of individual suits?

They do. That one book is really about one country trying to sue another country for the use of military weapons against enemy combatants that knowingly and deliberately used civilian populations as human shields.

They should be suing their own government.

There are other options. This is a place where the state has the opportunity to justify its existence