German Consumer Group Litigation Research

Recently years, alone with the speeding up of the economic growth, many kinds of massive infringement events are happening frequently, which lead to a sharply increasing of civil lawsuits in the court. In the consumer protection area, the consumers whose rights were infringed often can only suffer the losses by themselves. Aiming at this, in this article the author studied the Consumer Group Ligation system which was created in German 100 years ago, to try to find out whether China can implant this system and how to implant it. This article contains 4 sections:The first section stated out the concepts as well as the history of German Consumer Group Litigation systems. For the purpose of analyzing, this section divided the German Consumer Group Litigation into two types; each type has its own history background and legal basis. This section is the know-how part of this article.In the second section, there's a close examination of the Consumer Group Litigation system. Based on the Acts which generated this legal system, this section examined the Consumer Group Litigation system by reviewing its scope of application, capacity of the litigation subject and the context of the claims.The third part studies the operation situation of the Consumer Group Litigation system by the way of case studying, and rank out the opinions of the operation situation of this litigation system. Within this section, by studying the case of German associations for the insured v. Allianz AG, the author indicated that the German consumer group litigation system produced a good effect in practice while still has several shortcomings which should be noticed during the implanting of this system.The last part of this article discussed the feasibility of the implanting of the Consumer Group Litigation system to China and elaborated the implanting plant in details. In this section, the author firstly analyzed the reasons why we could implant the German Consumer Litigation system. Then the author brought out a preliminary idea of the establishment of the Consumer Group Litigation systems in China.