From individual interests, national interests, here come diffuse interests. This is a category covering the underrepresented interests of groups of people who lack access to justice. In legal practices, this type of interests could be found in areas of environment pollutions, food safety, consumers’ rights and discriminations towards social minorities. With the rocketing development of society, the allocation of interests between different groups is way more diversifying and complicating than the old time. A guarantee of legal protection became essential to all, which made the mode of Class Action prevailing in a world scale. Class Action is by far the most economic and efficient litigation process of solving the cases of violations of large groups’ interests. In the meantime, it’s still in a quite complicated and struggling situation. One of the most controversial points among the scholars is how to qualify the plaintiff. The difficulty is caused by decentralization and massiveness of the interested parties. Besides, the level of damage for each one of them may be too delight to start a lawsuit, which is to say, even if you’ve won the case, the compensation may not cover the court’s cost. In order to avoid a second damage of personal interests, people are inclined to stay in silence. However, a Class Action that represents a large group of people has a great influence to the whole society and brings changes to unreasonable legislations and rule-making processes. Therefore, to ensure the development of Class Action, we must find its adequate plaintiff. In the United States, where the system of Class Action is relatively developed, NGOs and attorneys are the most common legal representatives for involved groups. To motivate more lawyers using their experiences and knowledge to help people, the court allow them to take the Contingent Fee, which gets criticized very often for the lawyers have earned all the money from their clients. But without doubt, this is also a good way to ensure the minority groups get helps from professional lawyers. On the other hand, even though Class Action is not yet a regular process in China, it starts to raise more and more attention. We realized that, a modern lawsuit mechanism is needed to deal with the increasing violations of public interests. Due to different legal systems, China can’t copy the American way directly by using the Contingent Fee system to motivate lawyers. However, in our history, there was a time when public procurators were representatives in the cases of large scale. Chinese Civil Procedure Law 2012 mentioned that a numerous party could recommend a representative. This change made great progress for the development of Class Action in Chinese litigation. And from 2015, 13 areas in China are set to be the experimental areas where procuratorial organs could function as plaintiff in the cases of Class Action.

本文首先從個人利益、國家利益和集團利益的異同比較出發，對集團利益進 行了研究。集團利益是一種為數眾多的集合利益。在司法實踐中，可以表現為環 境污染問題、食品質量問題、消費者權益保護問題、弱勢群體受歧視問題等若干 方面。隨著社會的發展，不同集團之間利益分配的多元化與複雜化，集團利益的 保護成了司法進步當中不可忽視的環節。因此，集團訴訟制度也在全世界範圍內 得到推廣和發展。 集團訴訟制度雖然能夠為涉及為數眾多的大規模集團利益侵害案件帶來最 經濟、最高效的訴訟過程，但它仍然是一個複雜且困難的過程。其中，學者們爭 議最大的問題之一，就在於集團訴訟原告主體資格的確認。這當中的困難之處， 在於集團訴訟的原告，往往分佈分散、範圍廣、人數多，而且每個當事人受到的 權利損害較小甚至可以忽略不計。若由當事人自己發起訴訟，甚至可能會發生訴 訟成本高於勝訴之後可以獲得的補償，導致當事人個人利益的二次損害。因此， 許多當事人選擇了放棄訴訟。然而，若從集團整體的角度來看，取得勝訴、甚至 只是提起訴訟，對整個社會來說都俱有非常大的影響力，甚至會對不合理的立法、 社會規則產生影響。因此，尋找到適合的集團訴訟主體，是集團訴訟能夠繼續發 展的前提條件。 在集團訴訟制度比較發達的美國，各種非營利性社會組織和律師是集團訴訟 的主要主體。法律不僅允許公益目的的社會組織來幫助弱勢群體維護自身利益， 而且還以“勝訴酬金”制度，來激勵職業律師動用他們的專業知識和經驗，為弱 勢群體打官司。雖然也有聲音表示，這讓律師賺走了幾乎所有的錢，但不可否認， 這的確激勵了律師的參與性，也極大地保護了社會弱勢群體的集團利益。 在我國，雖然集團訴訟還不是那麼的普及，但越來越多的學者、法律工作者 已經意識到，我們需要一種訴訟機制，來應對越來越多的社會公益侵害問題。因 為法律體系的不同，中國不適合直接照搬美國的套路，以勝訴酬金獎勵律師的方 式來激勵律師代表弱勢團體發起訴訟。但在中國法治改革歷史上，曾經出現過以 檢察機關為公益訴訟“提起人”的趨勢。 中國《民事訴訟法》當中，早已經有類似集團訴訟制度的“代表人訴訟”。 然而，“代表人訴訟制度”是非常俱有“中國特色”的，它雖然為我國的部分集 團利益帶來了一定的保障，但並不能涵蓋所有利益需要保障的群體。尤其是代表 集團當事人發起訴訟的原告資格，一直是頗具諍議的問題。 從 2015 年開始，全國發展了 13 個試點，將檢察機關作為發起公益訴訟的主 體。