Comparative Study Of The Group Litigation System

In recent years, group disputes began to appear frequently, involving various walks of life, various regions and all classes of the community, especially in consumer products, environmental protection, and securities investment fields. These events not only give corresponding groups a loss of interests, but also present a problem to the civil litigation system. Because the traditional single action and joint action mechanism have been unable to effectively solve this kind of dispute, then how to improve the existing system of civil lawsuit in order to make the procedure more fair, rigorous and efficient when handling such dispute? This paper will discuss the problem from the perspective of"public interest".This article altogether divides into four parts: The first part briefly introduces the characteristics of the group dispute,discusses the dilemma of traditional civil lawsuit system in handling these disputes and the neglect of public interest,then puts forward the necessity of development and improvement of group litigation system.The second part of the article mainly introduces the typical litigation system of several foreign countries,and analyzes the role play of various systems in protecting the public interest.The third part is to compare the foreign group litigation systems and points out the commonness and differences between them.The last part analyzes the background and characteristics of our representative lawsuit system, points out the existing problems of it, and gives some suggestions to improve our representative lawsuit system on basis of learning from the foreign group litigation systems.