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by geofft 3205 days ago
Of course class-action lawsuits are a money-making endeavor for law firms. We live in a capitalist society, where the way we make things happen is that we make them profitable. In particular, class-action lawsuits exist so that law firms can find it profitable to take on cases where there is a wrong to be righted, but any single individual isn't going to find the cost of going to court and paying a lawyer to be worthwhile.

If you think that lawyers being motivated by money corrupts the legal system, well, I would agree and apparently so would Judge Richard Posner, who retired this week because he suddenly realized how unjust this all was. But, well, this is the system we have now.

2 comments

Posner's an interesting case. He claims that he is sick of how the under-lawyered get mistreated in the courts, but he's been a consistent advocate of many legal theories to harm marginalized people and animals: he's anti-privacy for citizens, but pro-privacy for police, anti-souveillance but pro-surveillence-by-State, anti-animal-rights, anti-antitrust, in favor of a free market for selling children, opposed to equality of educational opportunity even though he doesn't believe in genetic racial intelligence and does believe that Black children are systematically oppressed, and even though he thinks copyright/patents go to far he believes hyperlinking and paraphrasing news should be illegal!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career

My more pressing (no pun intended) concern is with the press' coverage of these suits, when they don't lay bare the underlying machinations they are basically choosing sides.