Fitzpatrick on Class Actions

Brian Fitzpatrick (Vanderbilt) has posted two new articles to SSRN on class actions.

The End of Class Actions: In this Article, I give a status report on the life expectancy of class action litigation following the Supreme Court’s decisions in Concepcion and American Express. These decisions permitted corporations to opt out of class action liability through the use of arbitration clauses, and many commentators, myself included, predicted that they would eventually lead us down a road where class actions against businesses would be all but eliminated. Enough time has now passed to make an assessment of whether these predictions are coming to fruition. I find that, although there is not yet solid evidence that businesses have flocked to class action waivers — and that one big category of class action plaintiffs (shareholders) remain insulated from Concepcion and American Express altogether — I still see every reason to believe that businesses will eventually be able to eliminate virtually all class actions that are brought against them, including those brought by shareholders.

An Empirical Look at Compensation in Consumer Class Actions:  Consumer class actions are under broad attack for providing little in compensation to class members. One response to this charge is the argument that one of us has made elsewhere: consumer class actions should not be measured by their compensatory value but by their deterrence value. But here we take up this critique of consumer class actions on its own terms: can they serve a meaningful compensatory role? Scholars have taken up this question before, but they have been stymied by the lack of available data. In this article, we present original data on the distribution of class action settlements in fifteen related small-stakes consumer class action lawsuits against some of the largest banks in the United States. We obviously can make no claim that these settlements are representative of most consumer class actions. Nonetheless, we believe our findings support the notion that, under certain circumstances, consumer class actions can indeed serve a meaningful compensatory role: when they eschew claim forms in favor of automatic distributions and when they rely on direct deposits or standard-sized checks rather than the cheaper, postcard-sized variety to make those distributions.

RJE