From Sea to Shining Sea: How and Why Class Actions Are Spreading Globally

In recent years, as the U.S. Supreme Court has steadily closed the courthouse doors to class actions in the United States, an increasing number of foreign jurisdictions have adopted some form of representative group proceeding along the lines of a modern class action. Perhaps not surprisingly given the roots of the American class action in England’s medieval group litigation, outside the United States, class action procedures were adopted in the common-law jurisdictions of Australia and Canada before most civil law jurisdictions followed suit (Quebec, the Francophone Canadian province that is governed by civil law, is the exception to this generalization: it adopted a class action