Politics

Supreme Court Considers Corporate Right to Mandatory Arbitration

By Brendan Fischer

The U.S. Supreme Court may continue its march towards permitting greater corporate "rights" in the case AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion, scheduled for oral argument on Tuesday. If the Court sides with the telecom giant, it will greatly weaken rules regarding an individual's right to join class-action lawsuits, one of the most powerful legal tools available to citizens and consumers.

Class actions allow everyday Americans to join together and bring a single lawsuit in cases of widespread violations of individual rights. These suits are particularly useful when individual damages are relatively small, making it difficult or cost-prohibitive to bring an individual suit. A class action lawsuit allows wronged persons to band together, thereby making their claims more effective and efficient. Such aggregated lawsuits aim at deterring corporate misconduct regarding misleading consumer practices, unfair hiring practices, product defects, toxic pollution, civil rights violations, and other abuses. Class action suits have been highlighted in popular culture in films like Michael Clayton, which dealt with a corporation?s violent reaction to a class action lawsuit filed by persons sickened by health effects from its lethal pesticides) or Erin Brockovich, involving a class-action suit against the world's largest utility company for contaminating the water supply with cancer-causing chemicals.

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Full post as published by PR Watch on November 08, 2010 (boomark / email).