I joined every collective lawsuit that I can find, and so you can

“A large number of people may have claims, but the claims deserve somewhat small sums. They may have lost $ 25 each? You can make a company a lot of money by collecting a lot and a lot of $ 25,” she says. “But individually, go to court for $ 25? Forget about.” Thus, class procedures.

According to Hondler, collective procedures in one way or another were part of the American law for centuries. A dispute in 1820 on the property of the deceased general, West against Randal, It is widely considered the first, though Brown against the Education Counciland Which ended the legal chapter in 1954, is probably the most famous example. It considers its proliferation a function of an American court system that has less obstacles to entry from many others, including the lower court presentation fees, a lawyer for advertising, and legal representation on emergency (which is widely organized or not allowed in many other countries).

“When you have a system that is directed towards the law, you have a lot of lawyers and you have a way for people to find lawyers, even if they do not have much money, you have a means of lawyers to earn money by taking people’s issues,” says Heinsler. “Then when some issues arise – such as Facebook privacy – there are some lawyers who say” this is interesting, perhaps I can file a collective suit. “

Since the legal precedent is very complicated, Hinsler says there are many laws on books that allow collective procedures for everything from the above -mentioned privacy violations to a series of recent collective measures with wide political effects, such as Gig against TrumpWhere he ordered the judge for deportation trips to Venezuelan men.

“The current cases are on behalf of people who claim that they are incorrectly treated by the Trump administration,” says Heinsler. “They are trying to make the courts say” stop doing it, “not only for one person, but for all people like them.”

Regardless of their use in recent immigration cases, collective procedures as legal tools are actually in a difficult place. The collective fairness law, which was signed by the Bush administration in 2005, has easier for the defendants to transfer their cases to the federal court from the state level, a step that eventually made collective procedures more difficult to ratify, slow to solve them, and more expensive to follow up.

Instead, the prosecutors’ lawyers have turned towards mass damage, bristing collective claim, and multiple vowel-which involves coordinating large numbers of individual claims, instead of trying to ratify one chapter. In the before the Internet, many demands will be Cisvian; In 2025, smooth sailing is approximately.

“The main issue is that modern society produces mass injuries, collective complaints, and everything is a mass,” Hinsler says. “We have done a very good job in this country from trying to reach procedures to deal with the phenomenon of this” collective claim ” – a better job than every other country in the world – but we haven’t discovered it yet.”

Something to be discovered is that regardless of the appointed legal path, layer notifications or collective actions will continue to come – so people like Phelps and I will continue to survey social media and check our random mail folders. Perhaps in a few years, I will get a notice about another forty dollars. Until then, I will continue to pass, deposit and exchange quietly, because if companies can benefit from our data, customs and errors, then the least we can do is get their salaries when it arrives.

It is not justice, exactly – just the release we left in a system in which the accountability is slow, loving and acting. But until something better comes, I will not leave free money on the table. You don’t have to.