Summary
Class suits have traditionally taken place in an ambiguous legal territory that is marked by the tension between a person's right to a court trial with adequate representation and the obligation to abide by a class action decision. The US Supreme Court has issued decisions which have ruled some class action decisions are binding and others are not. Class actions are inevitable in an economy with mass transactions. A class action doctrine is needed that ensures binding decisions. Such a doctrine must formulate a due process right not based on individual representation in court.
See the full content of this document
Extract
An historical analysis of the binding effect of class suits.
INTRODUCTION
This essay is a history of the doctrine of res judicata in class suits. It reveals that the condition of precedent on this issue was from the beginning equivocal and confused, and that it remains somewhat so today. Specifically, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, English and American decisions oscillated between saying that absent members of a class were bound by a decree and that they were not. The same pattern of equivocation persisted over the next century and into the modern era, exemplified by the decisions in Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur v. Cauble(1) on the one hand and Hansberry v. Lee(2) on the other hand. The pattern persists in the Supreme Court's recent decisions in Cooper v. Federal Reserve Bank,(3) Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Shutts,(4) Amchem Products Inc. v. Windsor,(5) and Matsushita Electric Industry Co. v. Epstein.(6) Whether a class suit decree has binding effects on the class goes to the essence of the class suit device. If the judgment is indeed conclusive on the class, the usual rules of merger and bar generally apply. If a class suit judgment is only nominally conclusive on the class members, however, its significance is minimally different from a judgment for or against one of several adversaries of a common opponent. A judgment of the latter kind may have significant effects now that the "mutuality rule" has been abolished.(7) With the abolition of the mutuality rule, an absentee who is situated similarly to a prevailing litigant may be able to invoke the prevailing litigant's judgment in quite the same way a class member could do so.(8) Moreover, since such a judgment may be invoked offensively against a common opponent, the judgment has powerful effects on settlement possibilities. It is also true that a victory by the common opponent against one or more of its antagonists has powerful negative effects on the settlement value of the claims of similarly situated persons.(9) Thus, a judgment between one member of a group of similarly situated persons against a common opponent has significant dispute-resolving effects even without any effect of a class rule. The key legal question for the class suit therefore has been whether, where the judgment in such a suit is adverse to the members who were actual parties, the judgment would be not merely discouraging to absentees, but preclusive against them as a matter of law--whether the rule of bar applies to absent class members.(10) A subsidiary question is whether a judgment in favor of a class representative precludes other members of the class from seeking additional relief; that is, whether the rule of merger applies to absent class members.(11) In stark legal terms, the question is whether persons who were not individually parties to a litigation will be treated as part of a set--a class--that was a party, and hence, being deemed to have participated vicariously, are now deemed to be precluded vicariously. The resolution of that question in turn involves tradeoffs between equality of outcome, which is promoted by treating the members as a group, and individuation of process, which is promoted by treating them as individuals; between the collective interest of the group and the separate interests of its members, between the procedural and strategic interests of the members and the procedural and strategic interests of the opposing party, and between the convenience of society and the interests of one or more of the parties. Combining these elements, the choice involves a calculus of the utilities and disutilities of the class suit as a mechanism of justice. This calculus is at least partially dependent on the substantive interests at stake in a particular type of class suit. The problem can be formulated more abstractly: The law can regard any person either as a member of a group or as a legally distinct individual.(12) How the law regards any particular person depends partly on the legal task at hand. The group most tightly bound in modern law is probably the corporation, whether business, nonprofit, or municipal. The unitary aspect of such a group is so strongly emphasized that the members of a corporation as a group are, for most purposes, treated as a legal personality that is distinct from the constituent members and exists in its own right.(13) Until relatively modern times, another group of individuals treated as a unity for many legal purposes was the husband and wife.(14) Partners in a business venture have been, perhaps, next closest in legal affiliation,(15) followed by the members of fully organized, unincorporated associations.(16) At the other end of this spectrum, the group most loosely bound is a set of persons suffering or contributing to common injury, who, in general, are permitted, but not required, to act together in joinder as plaintiffs or when joined as defendants.(17) Such a set of persons may form a coalition for pursuit of their common legal interests, but the coalition is ...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
