July 6, 2004

Class Action? Third Aisle to the Left.

Here is a piece from Monday's Opinion Journal:


Last month a San Francisco federal judge ruled that a lawsuit by a handful of Wal-Mart female employees should be transformed into a massive class-action case on behalf of 1.6 million women who worked at Wal-Mart over the last eight years. In rendering his decision, Judge Martin Jenkins called the case "historic."

But critics of our civil justice system wouldn't call the case "historic" so much as sadly typical of the current state of U.S. employment law. The suit is based on individual cases that reveal little more than the frustrated ambitions of underperforming or unpopular workers, backed up by dubious statistical analysis and tortured logic that binds together contradictory arguments by the thinnest of threads.

The case began as individual claims, which the legal team, led by the trial firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll--specialists in suing big companies--has fought to elevate into class-action status in order to win a potentially big payday from Wal-Mart. To read the individual stories of the original plaintiffs of this lawsuit is to get a lesson in how employment law has been degraded to the point where aggrieved employees who have been disappointed in their careers regularly claim discrimination and sue--based on nothing more than the fact that they have not been promoted.


There is more in the Op/Ed. I have always found classaction lawsuits somewhat odd; how could people sue on behalf of others and receive damages without proving they were actually wronged? There was some legislation a couple of years ago for tort reform which would severely limited class action lawsuits, at least at the federal level. It may come as a surprise that this was opposed by business groups as well; it's cheaper to fight one case than potentially thousands. I wholeheartedly support such legislation, for it's one thing to write an article for a journal based on statistics, but entirely another thing to deprive a corporation of a billion of dollars if one could convince an ignorant jury to( I mean this in a nasty and cynical way; I don't care for the law profession and its practices. There are some interesting law profs out there who I read daily, but they seem to have escaped misery and an actual practice. I can only think of one practicing lawyer I know who's happy, the rest seem to be a miserable lot.)

Posted by Bob on July, 6 2004 at 10:49 PM