If you are new to class action law or even if you are a seasoned class action practitioner, you may be curious about the origins and history of class actions. Below you will find a sampling of articles available on the Internet that trace the history of class actions from medieval England to the 1966 amendment to Rule 23, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and beyond. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I tried to pick out articles available online that focus on or at least include a section dedicated to the history of class actions.
Articles on the History of U.S. Class Action law
This 2002 article by Susan T. Spence provides a “short history of class action law”:
http://www.abanet.org/buslaw/blt/2002-07-08/spence.html
This excerpt from a Rand Corporation publication entitled Class Action Dilemmas traces the “Historical Roots” of class actions:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR969/MR969.ch2.pdf
(for a link to all the book’s chapters and information on how to purchase the book, see here)
This article by Mark B. Seiger and Christopher W. Healy contains a short section on the history and development of class action law in the U.S.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5332/is_200602/ai_n21409174
(See here for a link to a full reprint of the same article).
This law review article authored by Professor Debra Lyn Bassett discusses the history of class actions in the U.S. and the development of the “representative” and “aggregate” facets to class actions:
http://lawreview.byu.edu/archives/2006/6/1BASSETT.FIN.pdf
See the outline entitled Sidebar following this article by Professor Edward F. Sherman, which outlines key changes in U.S. class action law since the 1960s:
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/decline_fall/
This article by Michael R. Mattioli discusses the history of the right to opt out of class actions and other lawsuits:
http://www.vjolt.net/vol12/issue2/v12i2_a1-Mattioli.pdf
This Legal History Blog entry provides an abstract of an article by Professor Stephen B. Burbank setting the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) in a historical context:
http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/burbank-on-class-action-fairness-act-of.html
Articles on the History of Class Actions Outside the United States
See this link for a very thorough review of the development of class action law in Quebec, Canada beginning with its origins in England:
http://www.tribunaux.qc.ca/mjq_en/c-appel/clerkship/class_actions.pdf
This one provides a history of class actions in Brazil:
http://www.temple.edu/iilpp/images/PDFs/GidiClassActions.pdf
While this one provides a more recent history of class actions in Australia:
As one that was relieved of his nest egg by unscruplious bankers I would be happy to join in with any class acrtion suit against the entire federal reserve community.
[…] groups (villages and parishes) was “well established in England by the 12th century.”1 In the US, the basis of the modern class action is found in Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil […]
Hi! I’m from Poland and I’m writing about new law in my country – class action. One of the chapter is about it’s history and sources. I was wondering if somebody give me a helping hand and write which books or articles will be aprropriate (maybe some of them are in Internet – it’s hard to buy foreign books). Sorry for my language.
Oh, and I see all those links above but I need more specific informations about place of issue etc. It’s for my ending study work..