TURNING THE SPOTLIGHT ON CLASS REPRESENTATIVES -EMPIRICAL INSIGHTS FROM DOWN UNDER

• Main Authors: Jane Caruana, Vince Morabito
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2012-10-01
• Series: Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
• Online Access: https://wyaj.uwindsor.ca/index.php/wyaj/article/view/4367

Ten months before Ontario became the first Canadian common law province to authorise American-style class actions, class actions became available in the Federal Court of Australia. In these two countries and in the United States, the named plaintiffs, commonly referred to as class representatives, are the only claimants formally in charge of the litigation, on the plaintiff side, whilst the outcome of class actions binds not only them and their opponents but also the claimants that they represent, the absent class members. And yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of class representatives in these three countries. The aim of this article is to partly address this significant lacuna in the international legal literature by providing the findings of an empirical study, that the authors have undertaken, of the persons that acted as class representatives in the class actions that were filed in the first 17 years of the operation of the class action procedure in the Federal Court of Australia. It is hoped that this article will prompt Canadian scholars to undertake similar studies with respect to Canadian class representatives.