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U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

nytimes.com

71–80 of 249 posts

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This easily could have been an issue raised during a Democratic majority congress and passed with the same story. After all, everybody hates lawyers that get rich while class members get a coupon. It's not about the issue.

You may complain that class-action lawyers get much more money than the plaintiffs, but that's the nature of class actions. They are meant for situations where many indiviuals are harmed, but each harm is too small to justify the cost of a court case. So naturally the plaintiffs get small payouts: each of them suffered a small damage. And the lawyers get big payouts: they handled the paperwork of thousands of clients…

> They are meant for situations where many indiviuals are harmed, but each harm is too small to justify the cost of a court case.

Don't they also get used for cases where (spitballing here) half a town gets cancer because the chemical plant in the area has been illegal dumping their effluents next door?

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#72

This is probably a dumb question but I would appreciate a serious answer. How am I considered a consumer of Equifax? Aren't the consumers the people that use Equifax to check my credit? When did I ever enter into an agreement with Equifax that binds me to arbitration?

You're not. Actually, you're a provider to Equifax, in the form of the data trail they're ingesting. A pretty good WashPo item (by way of Outline because fuck WP's nagwall) spelling this out: https://outline.com/aKwW2y

> fuck WP's nagwall

Funny how "Fuck you, pay me" is an acceptable sentiment when you're a freelance software dev, but now when you're a journalistic institution.

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#73
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be in the minority here, but I do not come to HN to get linked to a random person's blog. This is a concerning trend, and it's one thing when someone actually provides some level of insight in a few paragraphs and says they've written several pages on the same subject at [link]. But this is just bottom of the barrel "you said something vaguely similar to a blog post I wrote a few weeks ago, here's the link with…

Indeed, HN is all about stealth advertising for some new startup in the form of a blog post, not normal blogs!

As far as I'm aware, he's free to submit his blog post as a separate story (assuming he doesn't over-submit his own work or otherwise produce spam).

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#74
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you freeze or lock your credit with Equifax? Have you ever checked your credit report with Equifax so you knew it would be in advance? Congratulations. You no longer have access to the court system.

Cool, I have never done any of those things with equifax! Where do I sign up for the class action lawsuit?

Why would you? To get $10 and a year of free credit monitoring, and thus indemnify them for any further damage resulting from the breach? Better to opt out and wait until/if you actually suffer identity theft. Even if you're forced into arbitration you'll probably get more for your individual damages.

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#75
post #4

Pure speculation ahead: Suppose for a moment that the Equifax hack was carried out by a nation-state (like, say, North Korea). This is not an issue of consumer trust and safety. It is an issue of national (US) security and safety. To give another analogy, imagine that in 1920, the Canadian military marched over the border and robbed some banks. Does it make sense for the patrons of that bank to be able to sue the ban…

The degree of fault is determined through investigation, and it's not all or none. If the banks had negligently lax security that should have resulted in only 75% of the actual robbed monies being lost, they'd be on the hook for the remainder.

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may complain that class-action lawyers get much more money than the plaintiffs, but that's the nature of class actions. They are meant for situations where many indiviuals are harmed, but each harm is too small to justify the cost of a court case. So naturally the plaintiffs get small payouts: each of them suffered a small damage. And the lawyers get big payouts: they handled the paperwork of thousands of clients…

> They are meant for situations where many indiviuals are harmed, but each harm is too small to justify the cost of a court case. Don't they also get used for cases where (spitballing here) half a town gets cancer because the chemical plant in the area has been illegal dumping their effluents next door?

Those cancer victims aren't getting coupons

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#77
post #41

Is this an opportunity for a new type of law firm that opens up to deal with one type of complaint for one company and offers extremely low fees to file? The idea would be that the paperwork is all the same for the X thousand/million people suing INDIVIDUALLY such that economies of scale take over and the cost of actually filing and pushing the suit through becomes cheap enough for almost anyone. On the side of Giant…

With (most) arbitration clauses, you can't actually sue at all. You have to go through a private arbitration firm, which can set pretty much whatever rules they want - including things like basing rulings on religious law [1]. Compared to that, I'm pretty sure there'd be nothing illegal about rules to defeat the hypothetical law firm, like requiring complainants to show up in person. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/…

Except they have to get all of those millions of lawsuits dismissed individually by advancing that argument and failing in even a single of those cases through a novel argument on the part of plaintiff, sympathetic judge, etc could open an avalanche of lawsuits against the firms.

It also would force the courts dismissing the lawsuits to grapple with the sheer scale of criminality that the dismissals are being used to hide -- it's easy to hide it when you shut down a handful of lawsuits and the vast majority of your victims remain silent, but are judges going to be so accepting of mandatory arbitration when they've already, personally, dismissed thousands of suits because of arbitration clauses that are about the exact same kind of fraud perpetrated by the exact same people and have thousands more left on their docket? How many times do you believe that a judge can see the exact same crime happen from the same perpetrator and just go "Ho, hum, nothing to see here!" Sometimes, the key is just to be really noisy and annoying so they can't ignore the issue.

The act of filing the suits, particularly in a concerted bulk effort, and forcing the government to address and dismiss each individual suit is an effective form of speech and protest.

Your argument is shallow excuses for defeatism, which in turn excuses not actually trying.

Edit:

It also introduces a novel argument of "Uh, so this court has dismissed over 10,000 lawsuits about this exact issue -- clearly we're being abused by a corporation and petitioning the state for assistance. [Argument why the state is obligated to assist.]"

It forces the court to explicitly address the argument that the arbitration system is being coupled with a power imbalance to enable criminal action against entire states of people by documenting the scale via dismissals -- which are public record and can be used as evidence in subsequent cases.

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claim sounds good the way you put it, but less so when you consider that retributive justice seems ineffectual at deterring violent crime... unless you're also going to claim that shitty companies are generally smarter than felons.

The analogy does not work. People commit violent crimes for very different reasons than shitty companies commit economic crimes. And at the end of the day, there is some amount of basic deterrence for people who are not in some kind of adverse mental state. How many more crimes of passion would there be if murder, or assault, were not so harshly penalized? The “deterrence does not work“ line as a matter of degrees, n…

Or to put it another way, the grandparent's analogy fails because tort law pivots on duty to others and negligence in carrying it out. Criminal law is about non-interference with others and intent in violating that non-interference, which is the polar opposite. Lawsuits (ignoring punitive damages) aren't about deterrence - they're about restoration to the plaintiff. There is no parallel in criminal law.

Re: U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits

#80

What are some arguments for money in politics; lobbying?

Ask it on another level: what is money in politics? In-kind services? Donating your employees' time? Allowing use of facilities during off-hours? Selling someone something way below market value so they can turn it around for a profit?

Campaign finance is tricky stuff.

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