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The Law of Class Actions In Canada
by Warren K. Winkler, Paul M. Perell, Jasminka Kalajdzic, Alison Warner
Carswell
December 31, 2014
978-0-88804-728-1
Class actions are increasingly playing a significant role in providing access to justice to people who have experienced a common wrong. The volume of class actions jurisprudence in Canada has increased exponentially in recent years. Containing insights from two of the foremost Canadian class action jurists and a leading academic in the field, this text offers a comprehensive review of the ever-expanding law of class actions from trial and appellate courts across Canada. This text is a one-stop resource for practitioners, judges and academics looking for a current, comprehensive treatment of the law of class actions in an accessible and well-organized manner.
Class Actions in Canada: The Promise and Reality of Access to Justice
by Jasminka Kalajdzic
UBC Press
May 1, 2018
9780774837880
Whatever deficits remain in the Canadian project to make justice available to all, class actions have been heralded as a success story. Beginning in 1979 in Quebec, and in the ’90s for most of English-speaking Canada, class actions were introduced to overcome barriers to justice for those who would otherwise have no recourse to the courts. Class Actions in Canada critically and empirically examines whether collective litigation is meeting this primary goal.
First drawing on foundational literature and recent jurisprudence to propose a conceptualization that moves beyond mere access to a court procedure, leading class action scholar Jasminka Kalajdzic then methodically assesses survey data and case studies to determine how class action practice fulfills or falls short of its objectives.
Class Actions in Canada takes a rigorous, evidence-based approach. With class actions becoming increasingly controversial in the United States and collective redress mechanisms being cautiously adopted in many other parts of the world, this is a timely exploration of collective litigation as it has evolved in Canada over the past twenty-five years, and particularly in Ontario.
"Class Actions Dilemmas: The Ethics of the Canadian DRAM Settlement" (2016) 18:2 Legal Ethics 1
by Jasminka Kalajdzic
Published by Legal Ethics
January 2, 2016
Class action terrain is laden with ethical minefields. As I have written, ‘[l]awyers must regularly mediate between self-interest, the interests of the client, and the public interest. Judges must consistently ensure that the latter two interests prevail’. In the absence of rules of professional conduct that are responsive to the particularities of class action litigation, judges have had to create a body of ethical rules and norms piecemeal. A recent spate of decisions in Canada involving a single class action settlement reveals that normative confusion remains about the role of the class action lawyer, the identity of her clients and the duties owed to them. In this commentary I discuss the ethical issues raised by the recent Canadian DRAM (dynamic random access memory) settlement.
URL: https://www.uwindsor.ca/law/kalajj/sites/uwindsor.ca.law.kalajj/files/dram_settlement.pdf
"The 'Illusion of Compensation': Cy près Distributions in Canadian Class Action" (2013) 92:2 Can. Bar Review 173
by Jasminka Kalajdzic
Published by Canadian Bar Review
May 1, 2014
In both the U.S. and Canada, the now common use of cy près in the design of class action settlement distribution plans represents a radical transformation of the original cy près doctrine. Despite the facilitative role of class actions in aggregating claims, in some cases there may be no practical way to calculate or pay hundreds of thousands of small claims. In its current manifestation in class actions, cy près has become the mechanism by which aggregation of loss is effected. Cy près is therefore used not only to dispose of unclaimed settlement funds, but to avoid having class members claim a portion of the settlement at all. In this way, cy pres creates the "illusion of class of compensation” (to borrow Martin Redish's term), because the bulk of the class receives no compensation at all.
In this paper I critically and empirically examine the use of cy près in Canadian class actions, with references to developments in American cy près jurisprudence.
URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2427868
Biography
Jasminka Kalajdzic joined the University of Windor's Faculty of Law in 2009 after twelve years in private practice as a civil litigator. Her current research focuses on three areas: access to justice; class actions; and legal ethics. She has published two books and a number of recent peer-reviewed articles, including papers on judicial approaches to settlement standards in class actions, legal ethics and class action praxis, and commercial litigation funding.