Mass Actions: How Litigation Investment Makes Class Actions Unnecessary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores why the mass action, previously impractical, becomes a practical vehicle for the resolution of large-scale claims when third-party investment in litigation is permitted. This vehicle renders Canada’s current vehicle of choice for large-scale claims — the class action — unnecessary. The class action works by having one plaintiff stand as representative of the group, and binding all group members to the result. The mass action works the same as any claim with more than one plaintiff. Prior to the advent of litigation investment, the mass action was not possible in the traditional two-party procedure because of problems of coordination, free riding, and inequality between plaintiffs and defendants. If plaintiffs are allowed to sell control of their claim, a third-party investor can coordinate the multitude of plaintiffs in a large-scale claim, convince most potential free riders to join, and stand on an equal footing with a large defendant. Unlike the vehicle it replaces, the mass action requires no procedural reform. In fact, both vehicles can exist in one procedural regime, and compete for the claims of plaintiffs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".