Over the years, people have filed a number of suits challenging the Senate filibuster rule — the rule that effectively means that much key legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate (not just a bare majority). The courts have not reached the merits in those cases, instead bumping them on various non-merits grounds such […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
Read the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's 2013 Consumer Reponse Annual Report, which is the agency's name for its comprehensive report on consumer complaints to the agency. Among other things, it explains how the CFPB handles complaints and then reviews complaints by type, including, for instance, debt collection, mortgages, credit cards, and payday loans. CFPB director […]
Should assessment of a drug's labeling be the bottom line in deciding whether a drug manufacturer has failed adequately to warn doctors of a drug's hazards? Or should tort law take into account marketing by the manufacturer's drug reps, who may soft-pedal those hazards. These issues are taken up Failure to Warn: Facing Up to […]
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) is calling for papers from scholars in commercial and consumer law for presentation at its annual meeting in January 2015. The "call" is reproduced after the jump.
We've told you before about the mammoth "tax gap"– the difference between what Americans ought to pay in federal taxes and the amount that they actually pay: The IRS even publishes a tax gap map, which identifies the sources of the missing revenue. We've posted about the federal budget sequester and the craziness of cutting the IRS […]
Law professor Rhonda Wasserman has written Cy Pres in Class Action Settlements. Here is the abstract: Monies reserved to settle class action lawsuits often go unclaimed because absent class members cannot be identified or notified or because the paperwork required is too onerous. Rather than allow the unclaimed funds to revert to the defendant or escheat […]
The Consumer Financial Protetion Bureau has obtained this big-dollar consent order from Bank of America (BOA) arising from the bank's unfair and deceptive credit-card practices. About 1.4 million consumers will receive refunds totalling $727 million. BOA will also pay the CFPB a $20 million civil penalty. CFPB Director Richard Cordray talked tough in announcing the […]
The case is Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Company, LLC v. Owens. Here is the question presented (and the defendant's argumentative intro to the question presented taken from its petition for a writ of certiorari): A defendant seeking removal of a case to federal court must file a notice of removal containing “a short and plain […]
This article by Tony Mauro discusses the reactions of campaign-reform advocates to the Supreme Court's decision last week in McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down congressional limits on how much money an individual may donate in total to all federal candidates or political committees in a particular election cycle. See 2 U.S.C. § 441a(a)(3) (deceased Apr. […]
Go here or click on the embedded video below to watch a series of pieces by Jon Stewart on the Supreme Court's campaign-finance ruling, McCutcheon v. FEC.