During the latter half of 2011, I was privy to the following exchange between a well-known law professor and a well-known practitioner:

PROFESSOR: Yes, I wrote a piece which concluded that the class action is dead. You heard it here.
PRACTITIONER: And yet plaintiffs keep filing the things …

That exchange (which I promise actually happened), summarizes the primary trend in class-action scholarship in the last year: declaring the device "dead," either because classes are now too hard to certify because of Dukes, too hard to bring in the first place because of Concepcion, or too expensive because of curtailment of attorneys’ fees. Leave aside the fact that these arguments are most likely wrong (because, well, plaintiffs keep filing the things); they’re dull as well. So, while the federal court system made it difficult to choose only ten significant cases this year, the rush of early autopsies of the class action made it difficult to scrape up ten interesting articles. That said, here are the Ten Most Interesting Class Action Articles of 2011:

  1. Collective Justice or Personal Gain (Akron L. Rev. 2011) – Professor Stephen Meili provides outstanding empirical work on how plaintiffs’ lawyers keep class-action plaintiffs involved in their in cases. It provides (1) a fascinating peek behind the curtain, and (2) great fodder for further discussion of whether plaintiffs’ counsel are fulfilling their fiduciary duty to the class.
  2. Unreliable Securities for Retirement Income Security: Certifying the ERISA Stock-Drop Class (Vanderbilt L. Rev. 2011) – This student comment cogently describes an emerging trend in securities class actions–the ERISA stock-drop class action–and one of the key controversies within that trend. When people ask why we bother having student-run law reviews, a piece like this helps to make the argument in support.
  3. Embedded Aggregation in Civil Litigation (Cornell L. Rev. 2011) – The late Professor Nagareda discusses how even seemingly individual litigation can contain issues that require courts to make decisions about aggregating claims — and he uses those cases to show why the constraints of Rule 23 are more than just "hypertechnical bugaboos." Fascinating reading.
  4. Majority of Class Action Publication Notices Fail to Satisfy Rule 23 Requirements (Rev. Litig. 2011) (See also.) – Another excellent empirical study which asks: does class-action notice do what we intend it to? Most practitioners suspect that notice does not in fact actually notify the vast majority of class members about their claims. This study confirms that suspicion with cold, hard facts.
  5. Two views of Class Actions (Fordham L. Rev. 2011) – Professor Lahav’s article is hardly flawless, but the first half gets at a question that deserves a lot more discussion: are class actions primarily a joinder device or some other kind of legally transcendent entity? These two strains of thought continue to compete with each other as courts debate the propriety of various kinds of class actions, and some of the pre-certification tactics employed by the parties.
  6. "Abandoned Claims" in Class Actions: Implications for Preclusion and Adequacy of Counsel (George Wash. L. Rev. 2011) – Abandoning claims (or "claim-splitting") has long been a practice of class-action plaintiffs. For almost that long, it has worried courts, who don’t like to leave absent class members in the lurch. Professor Sherman provides a thoughtful review of various preclusion cases, and suggests that the phenomenon may be more of a superiority than an adequacy problem.
  7. Financiers as Monitors (WP 2011). After the now-traditional "death of the class action" introduction, Professor Burch provides an interesting justification of third-party litigation financing, arguing that third-party financiers may provide a necessary monitoring role for entrepreneurial plaintiffs’ lawyers. Having heard a number of financiers talk about how they fund litigation, I’d say that Burch’s argument rings true.
  8. Class Action Professional Objectors: What To Do About Them? (WP 2011) – Professor Lopatka and Judge Smith have provided an interesting analysis of class-action objectors. While they’re largely critical of objectors, they do recognize that some objections have merit. So the question they seek to answer is: how should judges separate the legitimate objections from the objectors-for-profit? Their answer (large appeal bonds) won’t be popular with some non-profit objectors, but they do put forward an intellectually honest proposal for discussion.
  9. Overlitigating Corporate Fraud (WP 2011) – Professor Erickson asks a nagging question: do securities fraud class actions really deter corporate misconduct that has fallen through the cracks? Or do they just draft along behind government investigations and other existing enforcement mechanisms? She approaches this from a doctrinal rather than an empirical standpoint, but it’s still a valuable first step in testing the deterrence justification that so many class-action proponents put forward.
  10. Short Sales, Class-Action Lawsuits, and Potential Information Leakages (WP 2011). Professors Blau and Tew have noticed two interesting phenomena. First, some plaintiffs’ lawyers leak their securities class-action complaints to short-sellers, a conclusion the professors reach by looking at spikes in short-sale activity just before a class action gets filed. (The tactic makes sense: short sales of the stock will put pressure on the corporation’s management to settle a case. It may also raise some adequacy concerns, since what class counsel has done is to drive down the price of the stock in order to benefit themselves.) They also notice that post-filing short sales tend to correlate with the more successful securities class actions.

I get the impression, even from some of these articles, that academics think class actions aren’t so much dead as dull; they’re just kind of bored with the device as it stands. These professors tend to think that class actions are cool because of their ability to effect large-scale social change or raise big constitutional issues. Now that the Supreme Court has issued a record five opinions on class-action practice in a single year, I can see where it might be hard for them to identify the next area of constitutional import. Since, as Daniel Girard observed this year, we may have witnessed the end of the "Golden Age of the private attorney general" (a debatable but interesting observation), it’s much harder to write articles that recommend new areas in which to file class actions.

Except: plaintiffs do keep filing the things. And, in doing so, they’ve raised a number of really interesting issues of legal strategy and civil procedure that the professors either haven’t noticed, or don’t think are worth their time. So here’s a list of the ten most interesting articles that didn’t get written this year.

  1. The changing role of adequacy in class-action practice. Where does one strike the balance between a class representative who can provide discovery and oversight, and the ability to actually bring a class action without investing thousands in finding the "perfect" representative? How much does class counsel’s role in the litigation matter? The Seventh Circuit in particular made three key rulings about adequacy this year: CE Design, Creative Montessori, and In re Aqua Dots. What do these cases suggest about the inquiries into adequacy of counsel and adequacy of representation?
  2. The changing role of superiority. Should the analysis include the effects on non-parties to class actions? The Sixth Circuit has held that the superiority inquiry can look at the effect of a class action on a state’s elderly population. How does the logic of that holding apply in the notoriously circular securities class actions? 
  3. The evolving debate over the propriety of the motion to strike class allegations. Currently, the uneven development of motion-to-strike jurisprudence has resulted in vastly different practices across jurisdictions. What does this say about how Rule 1 and Rule 23 can intersect? How will motions to strike affect the kinds of class actions that plaintiffs bring? Do different holdings about the motion to strike result in different certification debates?
  4. The emerging circuit split over the treatment of experts at class certification. There’s one good article out there already, but it predates the rush of opinions that occurred this year. How do those affect the debate? Does Scalia’s dicta in Dukes have any effect?
  5. The class action and fiduciary duty. Various courts have recognized that named plaintiffs, counsel, and even judges have fiduciary duties to absent class members. But what are the precise contours of those duties? How (and how often) do courts actually enforce them?
  6. The various new challenges to the "feasibility of joinder" aspect of numerosity. This has been a fascinating, though small, development over the last eighteen months, one that warrants more attention.
  7. Public relations and class actions. Despite the increasing amount of raw data out there, no one has really done a comprehensive study of the role of public relations strategies in class-action practice, or an empirical study on their effectiveness. Do class actions with media pushes result in settlement or larger awards?
  8. Follow-on class actions. Do class actions that follow recalls or investigations get certified as readily as "original" class actions?
  9. Copycat class actions. What are the incentives for bringing them? How often do they actually work for the copycats? How do "original" plaintiffs and defendants fight them?
  10. Settlement timing. At what point in litigation are class settlements most likely to occur? Most practitioners’ intuition is that settlement occurs most frequently after certification. But is that actually the case? If not, what does that mean for class-action strategy?

I’ll concede that these topics aren’t as sexy as pronouncing on the latest Supreme Court opinions. But they’re real trends and controversies, they touch on interesting aspects of representative litigation, and exploring them would be of real use to both practitioners and policymakers.

Regardless of whether those ten topics turn into articles, I have no doubt that the various battles still being fought over class certification on a daily basis will yield further scholarship. And, as soon as some aspect of class-action litigation turns sexy again, I’m pretty sure these same professors who pronounced the device "dead" will talk about its surprising comeback.

When that happens, remember: class actions were never dead. After all, plaintiffs kept filing the things.