You may remember that, last September, we told you about a 9th Circuit decision holding that Google violated federal Wiretap Act when it collected individual consumers' unencrypted wi-fi data while capturing "Street View" photographs. Here's what the 9th Circuit said at the time: In the course of capturing its Street View photographs, Google collected data […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
As we hit the middle of the U.S. major-league baseball season, I wanted to update our readers on the latest baseball-related (but not baseball-inherent) tort. As any major-league baseball consumer knows, at many major-league stadiums, between innings, fans are bombarded with hot dogs (and/or t-shirts) propelled into the stands from large bazooka-style air guns. At […]
We posted yesterday about the New York Court of Appeals' decision invalidating the New York City Board of Health's ban on the sale of large sugary drinks. The Board of Health targeted sugar because it believed that the best science shows that excessive sugar consumption is at the root of the obesity epidemic. There's a […]
Read this piece by law professor and dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
The New York Court of Appeals — New York's highest court — today threw out the New York City Board of Health's ban on the sale of large sugary drinks. The ban was a significant component of former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's fight against obesity. Read the court's 4-2 decision and Michael Grynbaum's article about […]
Eleven auto safety and other consumer groups have petitioned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking the agency to take enforcement action against the major national used-car seller CarMax. The groups say that CarMax claims its cars go through a rigorous safety inspection but that, in fact, CarMax does not fix defects that are the subject […]
As Jerry Hirsch explains, the number of vehicles recalled this year for safety problems has reached an all-time high (breaking the previous high established in 2004). It's June.
Law professor Christopher Drahozal has written Error Correction and the Supreme Court's Arbitration Docket. Here is the abstract: Supreme Court Justices from William Taft to Stephen Breyer have repeated the maxim that the “Supreme Court is not a court of error correction.” When it comes to arbitration law, however, a number of the Court’s cases […]
The Supreme Court held this morning in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, No. 13-317 (June 23, 2014), that the presumption of shareholder reliance in private securities-fraud class actions established by the Court in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224 (1985), should not be overruled. It agreed, however, with the defendant Haliburton that […]
That's the name of this article by Zywicki, Manne, and Morris. Here is the abstract: The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation capped debit card interchange fees for banks with assets of $10 billion. Credit card and prepaid card interchange fees were not regulated. The cap, which took effect on October 11, 2011, […]