In recent years, academics outside of the United States have made some of the most valuable contributions to the development of legal theory of class actions and other collective litigation. Here are two examples of recent works by thought leaders in this area:
INDIVIDUAL STANDING IN CLASS ACTIONS (A LEGITIMIDADE DO INDIVÍDUO NAS AÇÕES COLETIVAS)
Author: Larissa Clare Pochmann da Silva (Master in Law in UNESA, Doctorate in Law student at UNESA and Professor of Complex Litigation and Civil Procedure at UCAM – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Abstract (translated from Portuguese):
Individual Standing in Class Actions offers an important and interesting approach to the question of standing, one of the most important themes relating to the development of Brazilian class actions.
The first part the book summarizes research on foreign law, inquiring into the state of the art of collective protection throughout Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico), in the United States and Canada, in the European Union (Germany, France, England and Italy) and in Australia. Part two offers a comparative analysis of these jurisdictions’ various approaches to standing.
Part three organizes the main objections to representational standing and argues for laws recognizing the standing of individuals to sue in a representative capacity, demonstrating the reasons for its relevance, and the important role to be played by lawyers in class actions.
Finally, the book addresses the question of the participation of the individual from various perspectives, seeking to offer a systematic framework for the standing discussion and proposals for the improvement of collective protection in Brazil.
The result is a work that contributes to the development and strengthening of collective action law in Brazilian and brings a new perspective of modernization and improvement of tools for access to justice and the effectiveness of the process.
Pochmann da Silva’s book is available at http://www.editoragz.com.br/produto.asp?prodId=199.
AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF RELIANCE IN MARKET FRAUD AND NEGLIGENT MISREPRESENTATION
Authors: Alon Klement and Yuval Procaccia (Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliyah – Radzyner School of Law, Israel)
A deeply entrenched principle in the law of fraud and negligent misrepresentation provides that damages can be recovered only upon a showing of reliance. To prevail, plaintiffs must not only establish the mere falsity of a statement, but also show that they had acted upon the statement and sustained injury as a consequence.
Despite the intuitive appeal of this principle, this paper argues that the reliance requirement ought to be abandoned. Harm can be caused by a misrepresentation without reliance, and recovery for such loss should not be barred. When a firm misrepresents an attribute of a product, its price in equilibrium typically rises. The inflated price is an injury caused to all consumers, relying and non-relying alike. A rule restricting recovery to only relying consumers results in inadequate deterrence of the firm, which in turn spurs a host of inefficient effects: it may distort allocative efficiency; encourage investments by firms in the production of fraud; induce investments by consumers in self-protection efforts and in detrimental reliance investments; and prompt competing firms to invest excessively in signaling. Furthermore, it undermines deterrence by erecting a substantial barrier to private enforcement through class actions.
While the discussion focuses on consumer markets, it applies more broadly to other markets and other market structures. We explicitly discuss its extension to security markets, in which the requirement has been famously revoked. While the analysis supports existing policy in the domain of primary security markets, it does not do so in the context of secondary markets.
Klement and Procaccia’s article is available for download at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2372922