Nagareda on Embedded Aggregation in Civil Litigation

Richard Nagareda (Vanderbilt University) has posted Embedded Aggregation in Civil Litigation to SSRN.

Abstract:     
When one hears the term “aggregation” in civil litigation, the context that comes to mind involves the long-running debate over class actions. Viewed within its own terms, that debate tends to convey the impression that the world neatly divides itself into the mass effects somehow unique to class actions and the confined realm of one-on-one litigation. In the midst of this debate, a closely related set of issues has gone curiously underexplored. Here, the concern is not over some deviation from the one-on-one lawsuit. Rather, the basic suggestion is to circumscribe what an ostensible individual action may do in order to prevent that lawsuit from exerting some manner of binding force upon nonparties who are broadly similar to the parties involved. The idea, in other words, is to constrain what individual litigation may do, precisely because it is not a “de facto class action” empowered to act upon nonparties. Variations of this concern have emerged across what might seem an unrelated array of contexts: the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Taylor v. Sturgell, rejecting the procedural doctrine of “virtual representation”; the Court’s 2007 decision in Philip Morris USA v. Williams, regarding the constitutional due-process limits on punitive damages; and the multibillion-dollar deal reached in 2007 to resolve mass tort litigation over the prescription pain reliever Vioxx. This Article explains that there is something deeper going on here but that its nature and implications remain undertheorized. Each instance involves a more general phenomenon, what this Article delineates as “embedded aggregation.” In each, a doctrinal feature of what is ostensibly individual litigation – the scope of the right of action asserted, the nature of the remedy sought, or the character of the wrong alleged – gives rise to demands for the suit to bind nonparties in some fashion, beyond the ordinary stare decisis effect that any case might exert. Ironically, the features of Taylor, Williams, and the Vioxx litigation that make them situations of embedded aggregation also, in all likelihood, would defeat efforts to aggregate them overtly as class actions. The result is to leave the law today in a kind of procedural Catch-22, whereby embedded aggregation seemingly invites class-action treatment, but such treatment is unavailable due to the very features that make the situation one of embedded aggregation. This Article frames an emerging prescription for situations of embedded aggregation in a world in which the modern class action does not, and will not, realistically shoulder the entire regulatory load. The way out of the procedural Catch-22 in which the law finds itself consists of “hybridization” – the combination of individual actions with some manner of centralizing mechanism, just not always the unity of litigation generated by the class action device. Moving outside the parameters of the class action means shifting into new settings a similar need for a centralizing mechanism and, crucially, for legal regulation of the manner in which it may exercise coercive power. In so doing, this Article seeks to break down the prevalent supposition of a neat division between the perceived need for legal regulation of class actions and the supposedly benighted world of autonomous individual lawsuits. The time has come to move the conversation about aggregate procedure beyond the class action device – to broaden the menu of approaches available for our modern world of mass civil claims. Such an approach actually would remain more true to the historical emergence of the class action device over time than a prescription for either a vast expansion of that device or reflexive individualization in all situations of embedded aggregation. In addition, hybridization accords better with the emerging transnational conversation about the design of aggregate litigation procedures.

RJE