Briana Rosenbaum on The RICO Trend in Class Action Warfare

Professor Briana Rosenbaum (Tennessee Law) has posted to SSRN the abstract for her article, The RICO Trend in Class Action Warfare, 102 Iowa L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016).  Here's the abstract:

The class action device has been under attack for decades. Recent Supreme Court cases have further enervated class actions, and the current Congress is considering both class action and tort reform. Recently, defendants in aggregate litigation have employed an additional tactic by filing civil RICO cases against plaintiffs’ counsel alleging they fraudulently concealed a few baseless lawsuits among larger sets of claims. The predicate acts in those RICO cases consist solely of litigation activities: the filing of complaints in mass actions and related litigation documents. Members of the defense bar have made no secret of the fact that these RICO cases are part of a larger strategy to prevent plaintiffs’ attorneys from bringing large-scale class actions and other aggregate litigation. Despite the rich literature on class actions, this recent aggressive use of RICO by the defense bar and corporate interest groups to punish plaintiffs’ attorneys for the alleged fraudulent filing of aggregate litigation has gone relatively unexplored.

This Article pulls together several previously unassociated areas of law-including RICO, Rule 11, class actions, SLAPP motions, and asbestos litigation-to develop a model of the RICO trend. It then argues that holding plaintiffs’ attorneys liable under civil RICO solely for litigation activities is illegal, results in the lamentable federalization of state common law, and leads to improper forum shopping. The RICO trend also avoids legitimate state protections for litigation activity and is a thinly-veiled attempt by the defense bar to further weaken class actions by targeting the plaintiffs’ attorneys themselves. Just as critically, this use of RICO punishes the aggregate litigation device itself, rather than the underlying fraudulent conduct; as a remedy for frivolous aggregate litigation conduct, it is both over- and under-inclusive. This Article concludes by proposing several alternatives, including effectively barring any civil RICO action targeting attorneys’ pure litigation activities without systemic wrongdoing.