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Power and Legal Artifice: The Federal Class Action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Bryant G. Garth
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Abstract

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Using case studies and interviews with lawyers and representatives in class actions, this article explores the contribution that class actions make to their ostensible beneficiaries. The article first distinguishes the major types of class actions in terms of the roles of lawyers and class representatives, ranging from very passive representatives to individuals intensively involved with the dispute that gave rise to the litigation. The article next seeks to evaluate the class actions. On the basis of the results of the class actions, the article finds that class actions cannot be proclaimed major contributors to social change. The focus on results, however, is somewhat misleading. The class action plays a much more significant role through its impact on the parties as litigants and as individuals involved with a dispute. To understand this dimension, which has applications beyond the class action, the article suggests that the dispute transformation perspective should be modified to go beyond the metaphor of a dispute that changes form as it goes through different processes. Disputants in the class action can be thought of as an audience that interprets itself—and is empowered or disempowered—in part by what it learns from watching a legal dramatization of the dispute.

Type
Context and Process in Court and Bureaucracy
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , 1992 , pp. 237 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

The research for this article was funded originally by a grant from the Law and Social Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation. The author would like to thank Shari Diamond, William Felstiner, Ilene Nagel, Austin Sarat, Peter Siegelman, and Joan Steinman, each of whom offered useful suggestions for the improvement of this manuscript.

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