Posner Leaves ‘Enormous Imprint’ on Class Actions

Bloomberg BNA discusses Judge Richard Posner with Ted Frank.

Judge Richard Posner’s many class action rulings over the years have been “enormously influential,” and have cut both in favor of, and against, the aggregated litigation device, defense and plaintiffs’ attorneys alike tell Bloomberg BNA

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Frequent class settlement objector Ted Frank called Posner’s early opinions the inspiration for his work as director of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute Center for Class Action Fairness in Washington.

“He’s effectively one of the intellectual grandfathers of all of our work,” Frank, who argued before Posner five times, told Bloomberg BNA.

He specifically praised Posner’s “razor-sharp” opinions in Pearson v. NBTY, Inc., In re Walgreen Stockholder Litigation, and Redman v. Radioshack Corp., all of which rejected deals that Posner said benefited class counsel at the expense of the class.

“I’m confident that one day this decade a different court of appeals will disagree with one of those Posner opinions, the Supreme Court will take up the circuit split, and then tell us that Posner was right all along,” Frank said.

Read the full article at Bloomberg BNA.