Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Carper

Carper’s line performs a careful two-step that’s less about legal theory than political engineering: praise the tool, then indict the machinery. By calling class actions “an important part of our legal system,” he signals allegiance to a populist premise - ordinary people shouldn’t have to fight corporate power one-by-one, invoice-by-invoice, until they run out of money. The phrase “band together” is doing cultural work here, evoking civic solidarity rather than litigation opportunism, and preempting the familiar business-side critique that class actions are just lawyer-driven shakedowns.

Then comes the pivot: “but that system is broken and it needs fixing.” The vagueness is strategic. “Broken” is elastic enough to invite multiple audiences to nod along: consumers who feel settlements are meaningless coupons; businesses who resent sprawling liability and forum shopping; judges who see clogged dockets; economists who worry about distorted incentives. Carper’s economist identity matters: he’s not posturing as a courtroom romantic. He’s framing legal procedure as infrastructure - a market-correcting mechanism that can fail through bad incentives, information asymmetry, and rent-seeking.

The subtext is triangulation in an era of polarized tort politics. He’s trying to keep the moral high ground of access to justice while opening the door to reform (think: clearer certification standards, limits on abusive settlements, tighter attorney fee rules, better compensation alignment). It’s a sentence built to disarm: you can support collective redress without endorsing every class action that gets filed. In a time when “pro-business” and “pro-consumer” are treated as mutually exclusive identities, Carper offers a third posture: pro-system, with a repairman’s toolbox.