I'm mostly a lurker, but this thread caught my attention since I'm in law school. So don't take what I'm saying as authority. I have seen this discussed before here, and I'm sure there are other threads where this is adequately explained. But I would agree with much of what diamondliz said in the first post. Of the payment methods she mentioned, class actions attorney fees are basically always paid on a contingency. When they get settled, the defendants put in money for the plaintiffs' atttorney fees in addition to settlement funds and it all gets approved by the court. So no firm or lawyer is going to take a case unless they think there is going to be a settlement. And the problem with class actions is that the class has to be certified by a judge before it can even be a class action - until then it's just an individual lawsuit, or a group of individual lawsuits. And the type of class action that is being suggested has little to no chance of being certified. First of all, the people in the class have to be similarly situated in terms of damages. As an example, think of people who are exposed to asbestos, or get overcharged on their cell phone bills, or take a medicine that harms them - common types of class action suits. Most of the people in those classes will have similar types of damages, or at least can be classified into two or three classes. (For example, those who die, those who get really sick, and those who get a little bit sick). But when you think of the WTS class some are suggesting, you couldn't throw into one class people who are claiming all the different kinds of harm that the WTS causes. Maybe if you had a bunch of sex abuse victims, but not people who were harmed by blood policy, DFing, education doctrines, etc. Not to minimize all of the horrible things they have caused, but think of a giant corporation like Walmart that lots of people hate for various reasons. You couldn't just have one huge lawsuit against them by all of the people who hate them. In fact, recently the Supreme Court wouldn't even let a gender discrimination class action proceed against Walmart, despite a lot of evidence that there was a pattern of harm in that particular area. Bottom line is that it's not easy to get a class action certified.
This also doesn't take into account the free exercise clause implications that a lot of people have already mentioned. WTS would be treated as a religion, and not as a regular corporation. At least in the U.S., courts don't like to decide what is a religion and what is not (if they did, they could potentially be in violation of the establishment clause of the first amendment). If it looks even remotely like a religion, that's how they will treat it. (In other words, in response to what diamondliz said immediately above, they are not going to treat WTS like a regular corporation, or treat baptism like a business contract). Unfortunately, a lot of religions do things that are potentially harmful to their members. The Amish don't educate their children past 8th grade (a practice the Supreme Court has said is okay, even if a state requires higher education of its children), the Mormons and others shun, and Native Americans take drugs that are potentially harmful as part of their worship. None of this is going to be subject to liability by American courts in the present time. As was mentioned, as society gets more secular, standards may change. Free Exercise only protects as much as the Supreme Court says it protects, so perhaps we will change the state of affairs in the future.
