President Obama has proposed increasing taxes on high-income people as part of the package of tax code changes rolled out in his State of the Union address. Which efforts to obtain more revenue from wealthy and/or high-income people are practical and politically feasible? Those issues are taken up by law professor David Kamin in How to […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
That's the question posed by law professor and writer Garrett Epps in this article about Wednesday's Supreme Court oral argument (and the issues raised by it) in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. — the case about whether the Fair Housing Act authorizes claims based on disparate impact (and […]
Check out Meredith v. CVS Health, a lawsuit just filed in California state court. The suit alleges that CVS promotes a nutritional supplement to help treat or prevent macular degeneration based on a National Institutes for Health study, even though the supplement doesn't contain the ingredients that NIH found might be beneficial. The Center for […]
In Safe Banking, law professor Adam Levitin talks about this: Banking is based on two fundamentally irreconcilable functions: safekeeping of deposits and relending of deposits. Safekeeping is meant to be a risk-free function, but using deposits to fund loans inevitably poses risk to deposits, thereby undermining the safekeeping function. The expensive, inefficient, and unreliable apparatus […]
Here's what the Food and Drug Administration just said about so-called dietary supplements and foods claimed to promote weight loss: If you find yourself making this common New Year’s resolution, know this: many so-called “miracle” weight loss supplements and foods (including teas and coffees) don’t live up to their claims. Worse, they can cause serious […]
The Department of Justice's Consumer Protection Branch is looking to hire lawyers to enforce the Nation's consumer laws. And because enforcement of those laws is a frequent topic of this blog, it seemed sensible to post the announcements here. The deadline to apply for these jobs is January 2, 2015. One job announcement is for […]
Three years ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started its amicus program in which it looks for opportunities to file amicus briefs (and files them) in cases presenting important issues within the agency's many areas of operation. Reproduced below in full is a letter from the agency touting this important program. (Note that, in the […]
Ready for this year's holiday gift-buying binge? Before you set out to shop for kids, read U.S. PIRG's 29th annual edition of Trouble in Toyland. Go here for the excutive summary. The report surveys the dangers to kids posed by toys. The report covers toxins (such as lead and arsenic), choking hazards, excessively loud toys, […]
That is the name of this article by law professor Mark Totten. Here is the abstract: No one played a more vital role responding to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression than a small band of state attorneys general (AGs). Yet this story has never been told nor its implications considered. For more […]
The Affordable Care Act has taken some hits in the courts (but so far has survived the biggest attacks), and it is not terribly popular. But is it working as it was intended? Yes, according to this piece by Sarah Kliff. An excerpt: [I]f you look beyond the political fights, the picture looks very different [from […]