Yes, to academic idea that efficient litigation can be a substitute for regulation. That gets to the main issue in the linked article, which is that consumer f

Yes, to academic idea that efficient litigation can be a substitute for regulation. That gets to the main issue in the linked article, which is that consumer financial contracts often require consumer to use arbitration and prohibit them from joining class actions. The issue isn't that consumers can't sue. It's that suing (or arbitrating) individual cases is inefficient. Claims never get brought because no sane person is going to waste their time going through an individual arbitration to recover a $10 or $20 claim. It's hard to imagine any legal system where a claim to recover a $10 or $20 injury in an individual lawsuit (or arbitration) could be efficient. Such claims could be aggregated in class actions, if consumer contract terms didn't prohibit it. Class action lawyers often think of themselves as doing "social engineering"; forcing companies to pay for injuries they cause in situations where nobody is likely to bring an individual suit at all (e.g., small harms). Class actions don't normally result in much of a recovery at all for individual consumers, both because amounts for each individual are typically quite small, and because costs of litigation and attorney fees eat up huge percentage of claims defendant corporations are forced to pay. But at least if there were threat of class actions it could scare corporations into not violating terms of consumer agreements. So even if class action suits do end up mostly enriching lawyers, they still help consumers by giving corporations a strong incentive to honor consumer agreements. Class action lawyers as "social engineers".