Punishing the company is not the primary objective of civil suits. The primary objective is making the injured party as whole as possible. How does making the lawyers rich but only giving the class members coupons for more of what they are suing over benefit the class members any more than doing nothing?

These kinds of settlements which are the majority of class actions resulting from small harms to many people are insult on top of injury.

And so if you wrong 50 million people a little bit each, you should just get away with it?

“Conservatives need to get off this kick that class action lawsuits are bad for business.”

Maybe that would be the case if 90+% of them are meritless. Any class action that settles for a few dollars worth of coupons for the class members + lawyers fees never should have been allowed to proceed in the first place.

The courts and the government in general do not exist to right every wrong no matter how small. Trying will do orders of magnitude more harm than good.

Certainly, class actions have been abused by attorneys. But the abuse is not much more than businesses have been abusing consumers. The answer is not to shut down class actions, but to find a way to disgorge ill-gotten gains from bad actors and return those gains to those from who they were taken. In other words, lower the lawyer fees…