Follow POL on Twitter A new paper by Suzanna Sherry (h/t M.G.), argues that overreaching and greed by plaintiffs' lawyers resulted in adverse precedent:
Class action plaintiffs lost two major five-to-four cases last Term, with potentially significant consequences for future class litigation: AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and Wal-Mart v. Dukes. The tragedy is that the impact of each of these cases might have been avoided had the plaintiffs' lawyers, the lower courts, and the dissenting Justices not overreached. In this Article, I argue that those on the losing side insisted on broad and untenable positions and thereby set themselves up for an equally broad defeat; they got greedy and suffered the inevitable consequences. Unfortunately, the consequences will redound to the detriment of many other potential litigants. And these two cases are not isolated tragedies; they provide a window into a larger problem of Rule 23. When plaintiffs' lawyers chart a course for future litigants, they may be tempted to frame issues broadly for the "big win" - with disastrous consequences. I suggest that it is up to the courts, and especially to those judges most sympathetic to the interests of class-action plaintiffs, to avoid the costs of lawyers' overreaching. That is exactly what the dissenting Justices (and the judges below) failed to do in these cases.
I'll repeat my earlier statements that the panic over Concepcion is wholly unwarranted: consumers will be far better off ex ante if vendors adopt consumer-friendly arbitration clauses like AT&T Mobility's, and many vendors will prefer the class action system to such generous arbitration clauses, so the death of the class action is a long ways away.
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