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The Helicopter State: Misuse Of Parens Patriae Unconstitutionally Precludes Individual And Class Claims, Gabrielle J. Hanna
The Helicopter State: Misuse Of Parens Patriae Unconstitutionally Precludes Individual And Class Claims, Gabrielle J. Hanna
Washington Law Review
The doctrine of parens patriae allows state attorneys general to represent state citizens in aggregate litigation suits that are, in many ways, similar to class actions and mass-tort actions. Its origins, however, reflect a more modest scope. Parens patriae began as a doctrine allowing the British king to protect those without the ability to protect themselves, including wards and mentally disabled individuals. The rapid expansion of parens patriae standing in the United States may be partly to blame for the relative absence of limiting requirements or even well-developed case law governing parens patriae suits. On the one hand, class actions …
Class Conflicts, Morris A. Ratner
Class Conflicts, Morris A. Ratner
Washington Law Review
The approach of the twentieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor provides the opportunity to reflect on the collapse of the framework it announced for managing intra-class conflicts. That framework, reinforced two years later in Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp., was bold, in that it broadly defined actionable conflicts to include divergent interests with regard to settlement allocation; market-based, in that it sought to regulate such conflicts by harnessing competing subclass counsel’s financial incentives; and committed to intrinsic process values, insofar as, to assure structural fairness, the Court was willing to upend a …