US Class Actions: Promise and Reality
The US class action is the best-known tool of civil procedure for enforcement of mass private rights. It is intended to achieve judicial and procedural economy in civil procedure, and to exert significant pressure on corporate defendants to observe the law. This piece summarises the major empirical evidence on how the mechanism works. It confirms extensive enforcement of law. It also identifies issues of selectivity of case types (especially securities cases brought by investors), high transactional costs and reductions in sums received by claimants, the risk that high economic factors distort the legal merits of settlements, the limited evidence on evaluating the legal merits of outcomes, forum shopping, and aspects of conflicts of interest that have been criticised by European politicians as abusive. The piece notes that these features are predictable consequences of the policy of encouraging widespread private enforcement of law by incentivising intermediaries and reducing risk to claimants. Various questions are noted in relation to the future of collective redress in the different context of the European legal order.
Evaluating Collective Redress: Models, Evidence, Outcomes and Policy
This chapter asks two fundamental questions. What should the aims of collective redress be? Which mechanisms best deliver collective redress? The first is a normative question, and the second is an empirical question. The second question asks to what extent any particular technique or mechanism succeeds in satisfying the objectives set in the first question. The answer to the first question is a matter of public policy and perhaps legal philosophy. The answer to the second can only be decided by empirical evidence. The empirical evidence indicates that a number of techniques are better than others. Current evidence is that mechanisms such as online independent ombudsmen and regulatory authorities with mass redress powers are particularly effective in delivering redress to consumers.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.