Law Log Brief: Insights and Analyses

ABSTRACT* This article, on a thematic plane, engages with ‘representative suits’ or ‘class action law suits’ under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, to argue that for the Indian Supreme Court there exists a self-evident and routine ‘assumption’ that decrees under Order I Rule 8 bind all who are “interested”, even if never a (meaningful) party to the ‘lis’. This move, as is argued in the piece, collapses the deliberate legislative distinction between “person” and “party” while eroding the statutory scheme of according finality to the suit, and quietly converts a procedural device into a tool of substantive bar. This piece attempts to unsettle that assumption by showing ‘why’ the reach of representative decrees has been overstated and ‘why’ res judicata cannot be presumed in the absence of ‘participation’ or ‘privity’. It further shows, by invoking the “doctrine of revival” in injunction decrees that ‘how’ enforcement against “non ‘ eo-nomine’   parties” is not merely textually unsu...