A quiet revolution is taking place in the treatment under English law of the exercise of rights on a collective basis. This was confirmed by last month’s landmark Supreme Court ruling in Merricks v Mastercard. The judgment is an endorsement in the strongest terms of the principles underlying the UK’s opt-out collective regime — the facilitation of access to justice and allowing for the exercise of individual rights which, but for a procedural mechanism to group claims together, would go unvindicated. Where anti-competitive behaviour causes market-wide harm, the ultimate victims of that conduct — consumers or small businesses — are often significant in number. The value of their combined losses may be sizeable, but the individual losses are insufficient to warrant bringing an individual

Source: The Times January 07, 2021 00:00 UTC