The 10 Largest Class Action
Lawsuits in Australia
and the World

The first instances of these sorts of claims were seen in thirteenth century England, when villagers initiated a ‘group litigation’ against feudal landlords or parishes. By the eighteenth century, however, these had more or less petered out as individuals took affairs into their own hands.

In the United States in 1833, Equity Rule 48 was passed for ‘representative litigation’ to be carried out when an excessive number of similar, individual cases had been filed. This has now been subsumed into more up-to-date legislation for these kinds of lawsuits.

It’s generally agreed that the use and visibility of these lawsuits grew substantially from the 1950s onwards, as activists in civil rights and environmental movements utilised class action to gain publicity for their causes and redress for wrongs. Notable amongst these are:

• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) which led to the ruling that segregated, or so-called ‘separate but equal’ schools were unconstitutional, and
• Anderson v. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (1996), a civil action settlement dramatised in the film Erin Brockovich, in which the residents of Hinkley, California proved that the energy company was knowingly dumping waste contaminated with a carcinogen into the area’s groundwater.

Class actions effectively came into being in Australia in 1992, when Parliament amended the Federal Court of Australia Act to include ‘representative proceedings’. There have now been a number of high-profile class action cases in the country. Let’s look at some of the world’s largest class action lawsuits in comparison with those that have developed in Australia.