Replacing Inadequate Class Representatives in Federal Class Actions: Quo Vadis?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada and the United States, the ability to bring a class action is dependent on establishing to the satisfaction of the court that, among other things, the aspiring class representatives will fairly and adequately represent the interests of the class members. No such requirement is imposed on class representatives in Australia by the regimes that authorise and govern class actions in the Federal Court of Australia, the Supreme Court of Victoria and the Supreme Court of New South Wales. But trial judges presiding over class action litigation are expressly empowered to order the substitution of a class representative with another class member where, following the filing of an application by one or more class members, they make the finding that the class representative is not able adequately to represent the interests of the class members. Despite the unique nature of the mechanisms that operate in Australia to regulate the adequacy of the representation of the interests of absent class members provided by class representatives and the importance of this dimension of class action litigation, the operation of these mechanisms has not been the subject of critical analysis. The aim of this article is to redress this significant lacuna in the jurisprudence on Australian class actions by employing the data and findings that have emerged from the author’s empirical study of federal class actions to provide a critical evaluation of the operation, during its first 22 years, of the federal mechanism for replacing inadequate class representatives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.082 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".