July 06, 2004

After a series of procedural delays spanning months, the Class Action Fairness Act , S. 2062, is finally scheduled to come up for debate this evening (registration required, see also Associated Press report), with a vote potentially as early as tomorrow. Predictably, Ralph Nader and Joan Claybrook's Public Citizen has squealed, as has the New York Times (registration required).

In addition to my earlier PointOfLaw comment on the Act, see my Wall Street Journal column from last June.

Over the last few years, the Manhattan Institute, this site's sponsor, and its Center for Legal Policy, which I direct, have published extensively on the problems of class action litigation in America, from Richard Epstein's theoretical look; to Lester Brickman's case study on a class action in infamously plaintiff-friendly Madison County, Illinois; to the trio of studies written by John Beisner et al that assembled empirical data on magnet court jurisdictions. See also Beisner and Miller's new study looking specifically at the likely effects of the Class Action Fairness Act itself.