Reasonable people can reasonably disagree on the merits of the hot coffee case. I've read extensively on it and my personal read is that it's an absurd judgemen

Reasonable people can reasonably disagree on the merits of the hot coffee case. I've read extensively on it and my personal read is that it's an absurd judgement, mostly emotionally-driven, due to a sympathetic plaintiff and an unsympathetic defendant. tl;dr writeup I did here the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482931 That aside, you're absolutely right on the purpose of class actions. Generally the cause of action for individual case members is prohibitively small anyways. It's to form big legal sticks to beat misbehaving companies with, not to make the injured parties (whose injuries are usually pretty small in your average class action) whole.