Our readers may be interested in hearing about what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing on the enforcement front. Today, the agency issued a press release concerning consent orders against U.S. Bank and one of its affiliates: Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)ordered U.S. Bank and one of its nonbank partner companies, Dealers’ […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
That's the name of this new study by Deanne Loonin and Jillian McLaughlin of the National Consumer Law Center. They explain that A student loan "debt relief" industry has sprung up in response to the demand for student loan borrower assistance and this report documents multiple problems as well as potential violations of consumer federal […]
by Brian Wolfman The Supreme Court today held in Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett that FDA approval of a generic prescription drug preempts a state-law damages claim premised on the drug's design defect. The 5-4 majority opinion is written by Justice Alito. Basically, Justice Alito says that a design-defect claim is, in effect, a claim […]
Here's the Supreme Court's order: 12-1281 NLRB V. NOEL CANNING, ET AL. The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. In addition to the questions presented by the petition, the parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: Whether the President's recess-appointment power may be exercised when the Senate is convening every […]
That's the question addressed in "The First Amendment and Public Health, At Odds," American Journal of Law & Medicine, 39 (2013): 298-307, by Ted Mermin and Samantha Graff. Here's the article's first couple paragraphs (with the footnotes omitted): At the turn of the last century, allies of industry on the Supreme Court deployed a novel […]
Some of our readers may want to watch Ralph Nader on C-SPAN tomorrow, Saturday June 22, at 7:45 pm EDT. He'll be talking about his latest book, Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns. He'll discuss his decades of writing on topics ranging from auto safety to the Freedom of Information Act. […]
That's the name of this article by law professor Dick Daynard. Here is the abstract: Cigarettes result in over 400,000 preventable American deaths each year. In 2011, fewer than twenty percent of adults smoked. Since the publication of the first U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health nearly fifty years ago, when smoking prevalence […]
I noted earlier that American Express has won American Express v. Italian Colors in the Supreme Court. Here's what Justice Scalia says about the "effective vindication" doctrine — the doctrine on which the Second Circuit had relied in overriding the class-action ban contained in American Express's arbitration agreement: As we have described, the exception finds its […]
We posted last month (here and here) about abuses perpetrated by the concert and sports entertainment industry, which often makes it impossible for consumers to buy tickets at face value. Music-industry celebrities are sometimes part of the problem. The office of New York City councilman Dan Garodnick has followed CL&P's coverage of the issue and alterted […]
This article by Christopher Jensen explains that the big automakers are trying to use aribtration clauses in consumers' contracts with auto dealers to escape liability in court in class actions and with respect to individual claims under state "lemon laws." I posted in February about a Ninth Circuit ruling rejecting an effort by Toyota to […]