Courtesy of Pam Martens
House Republican Bob Goodlatte Is Hoping to Gut Class Action Law
Without holding as much as one public hearing, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are hoping to show their fealty to their corporate masters and make it next to impossible for citizens to bring class action lawsuits against corporate wrongdoers. A vote will be held today on H.R. 985, a bill with the Orwellian reverse-speak title of “Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017.”
While the media is absorbed in the wild accusations-du-jour Tweeted out by the President of the United States, corporations are salaciously using the media distractions to repeal a century of hard-fought gains in labor and civil rights protections.
The bill was introduced by Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest donors to the Goodlatte political campaign in 2016 were multinational corporations and their trade associations.
The legislation is so bad that the American Bar Association, which represents both plaintiff and defense counsel, sent a strident letter to House members on Monday. Thomas M. Susman, the Director of Governmental Affairs for the ABA, said it would create a “nearly insurmountable burden for people who have suffered a personal injury or economic loss at the hands of large institutions with vast resources, effectively barring them from bringing class actions.”
One of the worst features of the bill, and there are many that strip citizen protections to access the nation’s courts as a class, is a requirement that all of the proposed class members must affirmatively demonstrate that they have “suffered the same type and scope of injury” as the named plaintiffs or class representatives.
…
