One of the perennial problems with class actions as a procedural device is whether and how to recognize the conflicts and divergences of interest among members of the class (for instance, in a consumer class action, class members who plan to buy the product again in the future may have very different interests from those who do not on the question of what counts as a useful remedy). Lawrence Solum on his Legal Theory Weblog has a very long and theoretical post on the topic (Oct. 30) one of whose lessons (if we are reading it correctly) is that many of the conflicts are too real and fundamental to be conjured away even by clever theoretical efforts to reinterpret class members’ interests at a higher level of abstraction.
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Class conflicts: a dose of theory
One of the perennial problems with class actions as a procedural device is whether and how to recognize the conflicts and divergences of interest among members of the class (for instance, in a consumer class action, class members who plan…