“Maybe a large number of people have statements, but the statements are worth a fairly small amount of money. Maybe they lost $ 25 each? A company could make a lot of money by collecting a lot of $ 25,” he says. “But individually, going to court for $ 25? Forget it.” So, class actions.
According to Hensler, class actions in one form or another are part of the United States law for centuries. A dispute in 1820 on the property of a deceased general, West v. Randall, it is widely considered the first, though Brown v. Board of Education, Which put an end to legal segregation in 1954, it is probably the best known example. Consider their prevalence as a function of an American judicial system that has less obstacles at the entrance to many others, including the storage taxes of the Court much lower, the option for lawyers to advertise and the legal representation on the scope (which is widely regulated or absolutely deactivated in many other countries).
“When you have such a system oriented to the law and you have many lawyers and you have a way to find lawyers, even if they don’t have a lot of money, then you have a way for lawyers to make money by taking the cases of people,” says Hensler. “So when some problems arise, like Facebook privacy – there are some lawyers who say” is interesting, perhaps I could bring a class action “.
Since the previous legal is so complex, Hensler says that there are many laws on books that allow you to bring class actions for everything, from the aforementioned violations of privacy to the wave of recent class actions with large political implications, such as JGG v. TrumpWhere a judge ordered to go back deportation flights of Venezuelan men, an order that the Trump administration has ignored.
“The current cases are on behalf of people who claim to have been improper, illegally treated by the Trump administration,” says Hensler. “They are trying to convince the courts to say” stop doing it “, not only for a person, but for all people like them.”
Apart from their use in recent cases of immigration, class actions as legal tools are actually in a difficult place. The Class Action Faiorss Act, signed in law by the Bush administration in 2005, made it easier for the defendants to move their cases to federal court with a state level, a move that in the end made the class actions more difficult to certify, more slow to resolve and more expensive to pursue.
Instead, the lawyers of the lawsuits have moved to mass wrongs, dispute of mass coating and multidistytical litigation: approaches that involve the coordination of a large number of individual requests, rather than trying to certify a single class. In the pre-internet era, a co-descendent that many applicants would be Sisife; In 2025, it is an almost fluid navigation.
“The underlying problem is that modern society produces mass injuries, mass complaints, mass mass,” says Hensler. “We did an excellent job in this country in an attempt to find procedures to face this phenomenon of” mass complaint ” – a better job than practically all other countries in the world, but we have not yet understood it.”
Something that should not be difficult to understand is that, regardless of the particular legal road, class or mass action notifications will continue to come, therefore people like Phelps and continue to scan social media and control our spam folders. Perhaps among another couple of years, I will receive a notification on another forty dollars. And until then, I will continue to scroll, archive and collect silently, because if companies can profit from our data, habits and errors, the minimum we can do is to be refunded when they ruin.
It is not justice, exactly: only the version that remains in a system where the responsibility is slow, imperfect and monetized. But until something better arrives, I will not leave free money on the table. You should either.
