Mass Tort Litigation in Georgian Law
When a single event injures many people, international practice answers this with institutions of collective litigation. Clarity is needed here: Georgian law has no class action, that is, no mechanism for representing an unknown multitude of victims through one suit. The procedural regulation of group claims remains a separate matter decided by other legislation. What the Civil Code does give in this field is a single consolidating instrument, solidarity of liability: in a multi-victim scenario each victim builds an individual claim, but the allocation of liability among the debtors follows the rule of solidarity. It is precisely the deliberate use of this construction that distinguishes a strong mass strategy from a scattering of separate suits.
Solidarity as the Only Aggregation Device
Under Article 998 of the Civil Code, where several persons participate in the occurrence of the damage, they answer as solidary debtors. This means that the victim may address a claim for the full amount against any one participant, and the internal allocation among the participants is then settled in their own relationships. In a dispute resting on multiple wrongdoers this is a significant advantage for victims: full compensation may be demanded even from the single most financially stable participant.
The second part of the same article widens the circle of liability: damage is answerable for not only by the person who directly caused it, but also by the person who instigated it or facilitated it, as well as the person who consciously profited from damage inflicted on another. In mass scenarios this is critical: the object of investigation is not only the immediate actor but the whole chain that supported the damage or profited from it.
The General Fault Frame
The basis of the tort claim is Article 992 of the Civil Code: a person who, by an unlawful, intentional or negligent act, causes damage to another person, is obliged to compensate that damage. In mass litigation this frame is fixed separately for each victim: it must be established who acted, to what extent the act was unlawful, intentional or negligent, and what link exists between that act and the specific damage. The more victims there are, the more important is the centralised planning of evidence: common documentation reinforces each individual claim simultaneously.