After the financial crisis of the late 1997, the Korean government took a series of structural reform measures to improve the standards of financial system and to enhance the securities market. One major change was to enact the Securities related Class Actions Act that efficiently seeks a relief for collective injuries caused in the course of trading securities and ultimately to enhance the operational transparency of companies in Korea. Even thought this Act was in effective in 2005, the Act appled to some size of companies’ claim for compensation of loss incurred from the first activity after Jan. 2007.
Historically said that securities class action system was made and developed under the American economic circumstance which is the representative model of the formal capitalism. So Korea is the unique country which introduced the securities class action system to its own financial market among the OECD member countries excluding the U.S. and Canada. In that the Korean government should be very serious and studied many aspects of securities class action in order to make the system of the securities class action just fit to the Korean financial market.
This Article is basically to examine the securities class action in the U.S. focused on the Federal Civil Procedure Rule, Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act, Securities Litigation Uniform Standard Act, Sabanes-Oxley Act, and Class Action Fairness Act. Also the Article studies the current trend of securities class action in the U.S. in order to compare it to that in the Korean financial Market. The Article finally tries to suggest the
betterment of the Securities Related Class Action Act in Korea.