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The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005: The Defense Discusses Benefits and Minefields

By Victor E. Schwartz
September 02, 2005

We were there at the beginning. Members of Shook, Hardy & Bacon's Public Policy Group were seated at the table with others in the business community when plans were first discussed to create a law that would change the jurisdiction of the federal courts so that cases that were truly interstate in nature were resolved in those courts, and not in what has been referred to as state “Judicial Hellholes”'. (A full explanation and description of Judicial Hellholes is located at www.atra.org.)

In that regard, as General Counsel to the American Tort Reform Association, we helped develop the Judicial Hellholes project, which annually names places in the United States where defendants simply cannot obtain a fair trial.

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