Mass Torts and Class Action Lawsuits: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fifth Congress, Second Session, March 5, 1998

Front Cover

From inside the book

Selected pages

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 88 - ... when the question is one of a common or general interest, of many persons, or when the parties are numerous, and it is impracticable to bring them all before the court, one or more may sue or defend for the benefit of all.
Page 47 - Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser — in fees, expenses, and waste of time.
Page 79 - However true the fact may be, that the tribunals of the states will administer justice, as impartially as those of the nation, to parties of every description, it is not less true that the constitution itself either entertains apprehensions on this subject, or views with such indulgence the possible fears and apprehensions of suitors that it has established national tribunals for the decision of controversies between aliens and a citizen, or between citizens of different states.
Page 88 - In this sense equity must have a place in every rational system of jurisprudence, if not in name, at least in substance.* It is impossible that any code, however minute and particular, should embrace or provide for the infinite variety of human affairs, or should furnish rules applicable to all of them.
Page 87 - The policy at the very core of the class action mechanism is to overcome the problem that small recoveries do not provide the incentive for any individual to bring a solo action prosecuting his or her rights. A class action solves this problem by aggregating the relatively paltry potential recoveries into something worth someone's (usually an attorney's) labor.
Page 81 - And in a variety of contexts this Court and the lower courts have concluded that Article III poses no obstacle to the legislative extension of federal jurisdiction, founded on diversity, so long as any two adverse parties are not co-citizens.
Page 87 - Modern society seems increasingly to expose men to ... group injuries for which individually they are in a poor position to seek legal redress, either because they do not know enough or because such redress is disproportionately expensive. If each is left to assert his rights alone if and when he can, there will at best be a random and fragmentary enforcement, if there is any at all.
Page 55 - A US SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF WISCONSIN Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee on Agricultural Credit and Rural Electrification.
Page 88 - Where it is not economically feasible to obtain relief within the traditional framework of a multiplicity of small individual suits for damages, aggrieved persons may be without any effective redress unless they may employ the class-action device.
Page 88 - The class action was an invention of equity (Hansberry v. Lee, 311 US 32, 41, 61 S.Ct. 115, 85 L.Ed. 22, 132 ALR 741), mothered by the practical necessity of providing a procedural device so that mere numbers would not disable large groups of individuals, united in interest, from enforcing their equitable rights nor grant them immunity from their equitable wrongs.

Bibliographic information