Fed study on how usury limits affects who gets loans

Rajashri Chakrabarti of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Daniel Garcia of the Columbia Business School, Donald P. Morgan, also of the NY Fed, and Lee Seltzer of the NY Fed have written Less for You, More for Me: Credit Reallocation and Rationing Under Usury Limits. Here’s the abstract: Many states have capped consumer […]

District court rejects challenge to application of TILA and RESPA to PACE financing

Several states have adopted laws creating Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing systems for certain residential energy and home improvement projects. Under these programs, a homeowner borrows money to finance the project, and the loan is repaid through an assessment on the homeowner’s property tax bill. The lender’s lien generally has priority over mortgage liens, […]

Fourth Circuit Clarifies Rules on Pre-Discovery Class Certification Decisions

In Oliver v. Navy Federal Credit Union, decided today, the Fourth Circuit clarified both the procedure and substantive standards that govern when defendants ask a court to deny class certification before discovery. Oliver was a putative class action challenging Navy Federal’s underwriting process for loan applicants as racially discriminatory. Navy Federal moved to dismiss under Rule […]

Important interview with the authors of Debt’s Grip

Here, at Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Financial Law Monitor podcast. The authors are Pamela Foohey of Georgia, Robert M. Lawless of Illinois College of Law and Deborah Thorne, Professor of Sociology at the University of Idaho, and the book is about who seeks bankruptcy and what drives them to do so. Warning: you will order the […]

Study of the effectiveness of legal remedies for coerced debt

Angela Littwin of Texas, Adrienne Adams of Michigan State University, and Angie Kennedy, also of Michigan State have written Ineffective Relief for Coerced Debt: The Failure of Divorce and Debtor-Creditor Law to Address Debt Created by Domestic Violence. Here’s the abstract: Coerced debt occurs when the abusive partner in a relationship characterized by domestic violence (DV) […]

En Banc Fifth Circuit Challenge to DOT Airline Consumer Rules Ends With A Fizzle

In October, I posted about the Fifth Circuit’s curious grant of rehearing en banc in a challenge to the Department of Transportation’s 2024 Rule requiring airlines to disclose ancillary fees.  The panel had left a stay of the rule in place, directing the agency to address certain notice and comment issues on remand–but at the […]

California Supreme Court on Fine Print and Unconscionability

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court issued a  decision in Fuentes v. Empire Nissan, in which it addressed how the “tiny and unreadable print” in which a contract (here, an arbitration agreement) is printed plays into a court’s unconscionability analysis. The court held “that a contract’s format generally is irrelevant to the substantive unconscionability analysis, which […]

Is Trump’s debanking lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase precluded by an arbitration clause?

President Trump is no friend of consumer arbitration. As longtime readers of the blog know, during his first term, Trump signed the Congressional Review Act resolution blocking the CFPB’s arbitration rule from going into effect. So it is intriguing to see Trump sue JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s debanking him when his contract with the […]