As of 2002, the city of Seattle had paid over $ 200, 000 in settlements of lawsuits filed against the Seattle Police Department for assault and wrongful arrest, with a class action lawsuit still pending.

In law, a class action, a class suit, or a representative action is a form of lawsuit in which a large group of people collectively bring a claim to court and / or in which a class of defendants is being sued.

Class actions are commonly referred to as class action suits ; however, this phrase is redundant as the historical distinction between " actions " at law and " suits " in equity is no longer recognized.

The procedure for filing a class action is to file suit with one or several named plaintiffs on behalf of a proposed class.

Typically these cases result from an action on the part of a business or a particular product defect or policy that applied to all proposed class members in a typical manner.

Upon the motion to certify the class, the defendants may object to whether the issues are appropriately handled as a class action, to whether the named plaintiffs are sufficiently representative of the class, and to their relationship with the law firm or firms handling the case.

Due process requires in most cases that notice describing the class action be sent, published, or broadcast to class members.

In federal civil procedure law, which has also been accepted by approximately 35 states ( through adoption of state civil procedure rules similar to the federal rules ), the class action must have certain definite characteristics ( often referred to by the acronym CANT ):

# Numerosity — the class must be so large as to make individual suits impractical ( in other words, that the class action is a superior vehicle for resolution than numerous individual suits ), and

The ancestor of the class action was what modern observers call " group litigation ," which appears to have been quite common in medieval England from about 1200 onward.

The oldest predecessor to the class action rule was Equity Rule 48, promulgated in 1833, which allowed for representative suits in situations where there were too many individual parties ( which now forms the first requirement for class action litigation, numerosity ).

A major revision of the FRCP in 1966 radically transformed Rule 23, made the opt-out class action the standard option, and gave birth to the modern class action.

Adams contended that once such a special class had been created it became a vested interest and sought to maintain itself by assuming exclusive control over the relationships between God and man.

Writers of this class of science fiction have clearly in mind the assumptions that man can master the principles of this cause-and-effect universe and that such mastery will necessarily better the human lot.

More than once I was confronted by professional gamblers, `` bookies '', loan `` sharks '', gangsters, `` thugs '' and `` finger men '' -- people of a class I did not even know existed -- to repay my husband's staggering losses, `` or else '' I shuddered to think that someone so dear to me could even associate with such a sinister milieu.

The writer began this special class by explaining his background thinking for creating such a section in the first place.

The few cases of clear favoritism along social-class lines are as likely as not to involve representatives of the working class on the school board who favor some such practice as higher wages for janitors rather than pay increases for teachers, and such issues are not issues of educational policy.

However, there are relatively few such political constituencies, and, as has been pointed out, there is seldom a clear-cut distinction between the educational interests of one social class and those of another.

This `` grand division '' permits many costs to be assigned in their entirety to some one class, such as street lighting, or at least to be excluded completely from some important class or classes.

Her brain and intelligence controlled every function from navigation to such loading as a scout ship of her class needed.

A common criticism has been that many social science scholars ( such as economists, sociologists, and psychologists ) in Western countries focus disproportionately on Western subjects, while anthropology focuses disproportionately on the " other "; this has changed over the last part of the twentieth century as anthropologists increasingly, also study Western subjects, particularly variation across class, region, or ethnicity within Western societies, and other social scientists increasingly take a global view of their fields.

In class theories such as Von Neumann – Bernays – Gödel set theory and Morse – Kelley set theory, there is a possible axiom called the axiom of global choice which is stronger than the axiom of choice for sets because it also applies to proper classes.

This class is mainly based on enantio-labdatrienonic acids, such as ozic and zanzibaric acids.

An entirely different class of ideas, also termed animistic, is the belief in the world soul anima mundi, held by philosophers such as Schelling and others.

Palamedes, Creugas and Damoxenus, the Combat of Theseus and the Centaur, and Hercules and Lichas may close the class of heroic compositions, although the catalogue might be swelled by the enumeration of various others, such as Hector and Ajax, King Ferdinand of Naples, and others.

In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal ( BCD ) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each decimal digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight, although other sizes ( such as six bits ) have been used historically.

Schools may also own and operate their own buses for other transport needs, such as class field trips, or to transport associated sports, music or other school groups.

Typical subjects include mining, raising and droving cattle, sheep shearing, wanderings, war stories, the 1891 Australian shearers ' strike, class conflicts between the landless working class and the squatters ( landowners ), and outlaws such as Ned Kelly, as well as love interests and more modern fare such as trucking.

A class of algorithms called SAT solvers can efficiently solve a large enough subset of SAT instances to be useful in various practical areas such as circuit design and automatic theorem proving, by solving SAT instances made by transforming problems that arise in those areas.

Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as " black ", and often social variables such as class and socio-economic status also play a role, so that relatively dark-skinned people can be classified as white if they fulfill other social criteria of " whiteness " and relatively light-skinned people can be classified as black if they fulfill the social criteria for " blackness " in a particular setting.

The critic Michael Medved characterized examples of the " so bad it's good " class of low-budget cult film through books such as The Golden Turkey Awards.

For example, an " X " is used to indicate a variable group amongst a class of compounds ( though usually a halogen ), while " R " is used for a radical, meaning a compound structure such as a hydrocarbon chain.

Finally, a class action avoids the situation where different court rulings could create " incompatible standards " of conduct for the defendant to follow.

Thus, courts will generally allow a class action in such a situation.

Cox argued in 1948 that caste cannot be compared to race or class, because, according to him, caste was static, the social inferiors in a caste system were ‘ content with their situation ’, and there was no social movement for their betterment.

Workers ' solidarity means that anarcho-syndicalists believe all workers — no matter their race, gender, or ethnic group — are in a similar situation in regard to their boss ( class consciousness ).

It is called the " diamond problem " because of the shape of the class inheritance diagram in this situation.

For Marxists, class antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production necessarily entails control over the class which produces goods — in capitalism this is the exploitation of workers by the bourgeoisie.

Whether offense is taken at hearing the word varies greatly according to listener and situation, and is related to age and social class: elderly speakers and those of ( or aspiring to ) higher socioeconomic strata tend to use it more privately and selectively than younger and more blue-collar speakers.

Responsibility for the worsening of the situation is widely attributed to the Northern people, though the quality of life under Houphouët-Boigny was mainly due to the sponsoring through the " Françafrique " system ( designed to consolidate the influence of France in Africa ), and the economy worked mainly thanks to a low-paid Burkinabé working class and immigrants from Mali.

Because of the economic situation during the mid-period and the predominance of the merchant class, developing yakuza groups were composed of misfits and delinquents that had joined or formed yakuza groups to extort customers in local markets by selling fake or shoddy goods.

Workers ' solidarity means that anarcho-syndicalists believe all workers, no matter what their gender or ethnic group, are in a similar situation in regard to their bosses ( class consciousness ).

This class situation rested primarily on:

In his youth, Albert was seriously concerned with the situation of the working classes in Belgium, and personally traveled around working class districts incognito, to observe the living conditions of the people.

The theory of Permanent Revolution considers that in many countries, which are thought under Trotskyism to have not yet completed a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the capitalist class oppose the creation of any revolutionary situation.

Small farms in this situation often went bankrupt and were bought up by the wealthy upper class, forming huge private estates.

Clubs generally provide their students the opportunity to dance outside of the class situation.

His situation only gets more complicated when the school board grows suspicious of him, students take to fighting with each other, and one of the girls of his class develops romantic feelings for him.

It is possible that the story is merely a revenge fantasy, in which the indifferent wealthy suffer the fate they " deserve ", concocted by Poe in response to his observations of class distinctions of his day, a sublimation of his own frustrations at his own situation in life or perceived slights.

For Toynbee, early industrial capitalism and the situation of the working class in it was not just a subject of ivory-tower studies ; he was actively involved in improving the living conditions of the proletariat.

King hoped for a coalition between civil rights and labor that would improve the situation for the entire working class by ending white supremacy.

Thus a person's class situation is basically his market situation.

Those who share a similar class situation also share similar life chances.

This displays the situation of the working class, who have been recruited to fight and do not know who they are fighting or why they are fighting at all.