What is a class action lawsuit?
In a class action, one or more people called class representatives (in this case, Plaintiff Jason Anderson acted as the class representative) sue on behalf of people who have similar claims. All these people together constitute a Plaintiff Class. This is a class action because one court resolves all class-wide issues for all people who meet the class definition, except for those who excluded (also referred to as opted out) themselves from the class.
A class action lawsuit is one in which one or more individuals (the “named plaintiffs”) sue on behalf of themselves and a class of persons whose claims are similar to those of the named plaintiffs. A class action is appropriate in cases in which the named plaintiff alleges that the defendant committed the same wrong to large group of persons. The advantages of class action are that the claims of a large group of injured persons can be decided in one suit rather than in hundreds or thousands of individual lawsuits. By aggregating claims with those of the entire class, the named plaintiff is frequently able to pursue a claim that would be too expensive to prosecute on an individual basis.
A class action is a lawsuit where one person (or a few people) seeks to represent a larger group of people who have similar legal claims against the same defendants. The court must agree that it is appropriate for a defined “Class” to be “certified” and for the “representative plaintiff” to pursue claims on behalf the Class.
