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.
Private enforcement of competition law, the hidden story: competition litigation settlements in the United Kingdom, 2000-2005
Reports on the author's research into various characteristics of the competition law settlements that were agreed between 2000 and 2005, exploring the findings and setting them out in tables and charts. Discusses the merits of settling private competition disputes. Describes the methodology of the research. Notes additional findings for 2006.