Talk:Class action

Disagree with User:Agtx's edits

I strongly recommend reading Professor Yeazell's book on the subject. I had carefully and accurately summarized Yeazell's key insights into the convoluted history of group litigation and class actions but unfortunately, User:Agtx seems to have missed the point. One of Yeazell's most exhaustively argued and important points is that despite his intellectual brilliance, Story could not understand the why of group litigation because it was completely outside of his frame of reference. --Coolcaesar (talk) 00:38, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

@Coolcaesar: The reason I trimmed down the section is that this article is meant to be an encyclopedic entry on class actions, and not a detailed summary of Prof. Yeazell's book. He may well be right about Justice Story, but the section read like it was written by Prof. Yeazell's research assistant, and not like it was meant to be a general interest article on class actions. The edits I made were meant to focus the article. I still think that the section needs work to focus it better, and it especially needs citations to sources other than Prof Yeazell's book (Marty Redish comes immediately to mind, and I'm sure there are others). Agtx (talk) 23:04, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Your analysis comes across as quite bizarre and untenable as I already put a great deal of time into boiling down Yeazell's sophisticated analysis into a style appropriate for a general audience (i.e., high school graduates). The last time I checked, the English Wikipedia is not written for 12-year-olds. For example, following your reasoning, we should delete most of the article on general relativity because it is not written as a "general interest article." It requires understanding of tensor algebra, a concept nearly incomprehensible to the majority of college graduates, myself included, whose mathematical education terminated with differential equations. --Coolcaesar (talk) 11:23, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I've been working on class actions lately and getting a lot more acquainted with this area of law. The history section of the leading treatise on the subject, Newberg on Class Actions, specifically praises Professor Yeazell's work on the history of class actions, as does this 2013 article by a Stanford professor (who at the time was still at Berkeley). Again, I reiterate my objection that User:Agtx's revisions inappropriately deleted Professor Yeazell's important insight into why group litigation came to exist in the first place. --Coolcaesar (talk) 21:15, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Do you have suggestions for specific parts of that history that should go back in, without replacing the entire lengthy summary of Yeazell's book? I cut it down (four years ago) because 1) it was too detailed and 2) it seemed to be more about Yeazell than about class actions. This article shouldn't be a summary of a single UCLA professor's research and writing on class actions. When a history section contains many, many paragraphs containing a citation to only a single author, that's a red flag. Your citations above—a Supreme Court case citing a treatise that mentions him and a tribute piece written for a symposium at UCLA in Yeazell's honor—don't change that. agtx 22:43, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

To follow up on this: I just checked yesterday at the library of a major research university (while visiting for unrelated reasons) and as far as I can tell, Redish's publications have not delved into the pre-FRCP history of class actions.

What I did notice yesterday (and over the past few years while continuing to work on complex litigation) is that everyone who touches on the history of class actions in their publications isn't doing their own research when it comes to pre-FRCP history. They are all citing Yeazell's book and directing the reader to go there if they are curious about such ancient history. A couple of publicly available examples include this 2011 article from Canada and this 2020 article by the late Anne Fleming, a Georgetown professor who suddenly died before the article was published. So the answer is no, it's not a "red flag" to cite solely to Yeazell for pre-FRCP history. The point is that when everyone is deferring to Yeazell on this point, that means his work is so exhaustively researched that no one has dared to challenge or revisit his analysis and it is treated as authoritative among class action experts. --Coolcaesar (talk) 12:32, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Another issue with User:Agtx's edits

That was a poor choice to remove the clarification that the term "class action lawsuit" is pleonastic. One of the very first things everyone learns when they go to law school is the fundamental difference between an action at law and a suit in equity and how they continue to haunt the common law from their graves. The term "lawsuit" is already redundant so the term "class action lawsuit" is doubly redundant. --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:46, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Also, to follow up on this point: I've noticed that class action specialists are very careful in oral and written communications to not say "class action lawsuit", presumably because the difference between "action" and "suit" is pounded into them either in law school or at their first class action job. It's only laypersons and lawyers from other fields unfamiliar with complex litigation who use that phrase. --Coolcaesar (talk) 12:34, 17 July 2023 (UTC)