http://www.latimes.com/business/sc-d...,1239412.story

You all know that I don't know much about anything, but this seems pretty bad to me.

In the past, I've probably said, "Class action lawsuits are great!.........for law firms." But I've gotten between a half dozen to a dozen class action inclusions in the mail over the last few years, and all of them were because I'd (allegedly) been screwed over in small ways for small amounts over (in some cases) long periods of time.

Who's going to challenge a company over $1.99/month in court, or even arbitration? Will that company even give a ****? The better option would be to switch companies. But where am I gonna go? To that other company that also screwed their customers out of $1.99/month in a different way? No. How many cellular companies are there? How many cable providers?

Few individuals are going to get mad enough about small problems such as these to take action, and yet companies can wring millions per month out of their customers with little fear of reprisal. Now the customers can't band together and get loud enough to make a difference?

I'll look for a link from here about this case from several months ago if I can find it. I want to say that it was made clear that arbitration was rigged in many cases, as the companies were able to get sympathetic arbitrators more often than the law of averages should allow for.

Haven't read the opinion, but this sounds like a pretty lame ruling. Would be interested in seeing an ACist take, I think there's a lot of law-and-economics / market-based arguments against mandatory arbitration clauses in these sorts of circumstances.

This **** was to be expected after the whole "Corporations = Citizens" ruling by the earlier SC imo

shocking... the conservative SC votes 5-4 in favor of corporations and against consumers yet again... The Boy King's legacy lives on.

Do you mean politically? Because the two cases have just about nothing whatsoever to do with one another...

And if you do mean politically, it's to be expected ever since Roberts/Alito joined the Court, really.

Roughly expected, but I reserve the right to be disappointed in Kennedy imo.

I think no matter how valid their criticism, it wouldn't apply to us right now, as we don't live in a vacuum. We already have (large) corporations getting the lion's share of governmental aid. If the see-saw were in balance, I might even have a different opinion of this ruling.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-893.pdf

Link to the decision.

Something about reading Supreme Court decisions as a way to avoid studying for law school finals is deeply disturbing to me, but it's happening.

Every time I start reading Supreme Court decisions, I wake up naked in a neighboring city with no recollection of what happened.

+1

Quick cliffs: The argument revolves around The Federal Arbitration Act, particularly the bolded section

.

The Plaintiffs believe that the FAA should not apply because:

The majority opinion ruled that:

Basically, a state can't rule a contract unconscionable simply because that states prefers class action suits over arbitration. They go on to say that the bolded part of the FAA above cannot be used to completely undermine the purpose of the law. Which is to ensure that contracts that call for arbitration will be settled by arbitration. They also say that the arbitration procedures in the contract do not favor the company in such a way that would make the contract unconscionable.

edit: and now my eyes are crossed and watering. I'm not going to be able to decipher anything else intelligent from that mess. I couldn't even make it to the concurring opinion, let alone the dissent.

Good luck enforcing that one.

He seems to have really moved to the right since Obama was elected.

pretty much. corporations are charters of pvn's hotdog club.

Although I did not read the decision, I would say I am against class action lawsuits. For example, the cell phone bill. If you don't like the fees it is a free market use another phone or better don't use one at all. The only people getting rich off this are the lawyers. So they remove the fees, they will just raise the price of the overall plans. People buy products. If you don't like the product don't buy it. If the contracts become too complicated, avoid them.

It is not the corps vs the consumers. It is the lawyers vs the corporations. The consumer can always avoid the corporation.

I could be wrong, but I think that when people filed class action lawsuits over fees it was over fees that the phone companies tacked onto their bills that were not authorized in the contracts. Without class action suits being possible against this sort of behavior, it is going to be very easy for companies to get away with fraud against consumers. No individual consumer is going to find a lawyer willing to sue over a fraudulent $3 fee, nor are too many people going to take the time to go through arbitration over such a small amount, and so the company goes unpunished while raking in tons of money by spreading a small fraudulent charge over millions of customers.

This. ****ing bastards.

fyp!

I was beginning to think someone else was posting under your name until I saw this post.

monopoly on the highest court in all the land, the court that determines what the law of the land is itself, constructed by the federal government, rules in the favor of corporations? no, ac-ists don't have much to say about the inner meetings of plutocrats, except lol at naivety.

So basically, this means if a company sucks, customers can do pretty much nothing about it now?

How tyrannical.

The "greedy" attorneys play an important role by bearing the monetary risk of litigating these small-damage consumer class actions. For every successful case where there are sizable attorney's fees, there are many more unsuccessful cases where the plaintiffs' attorney has spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars litigating the case and recovers nothing.

Now, if a consumer is fraudulently charged a nominal amount of money, they will have to risk $1000 or more of their own money to recover in arbitration.

I don't even understand the anti-lawyer angle here, the folks in the profession making the consistent big bucks are often the ones doing in-house work or otherwise representing/defending corporations. Like, the guy who wrote these contracts, for example.

Lawyers profit off of all lawsuits, so when conservatives (or whomever) are looking for reasons to oppose [insert type of liability here] they will generally just bust this out for good measure.