Author Archives: Brian Wolfman

“Common Problems for the Common Answers Test: Class Certification in Amgen and Comcast”

That is the name of this article by law professor Mark Moller. Here is the abstract: The Supreme Court’s 2011 decision, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, drew heavily on the work of the late Professor Richard Nagareda. In a series of seminal articles, Professor Nagareda urged courts to treat class action procedure as a handmaiden […]

The CFPB’s favorite enforcement targets: banks (no surprise there) and lawyers

According to this article by Jenna Greene, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been targetting lawyers in its enforcement suits. Here's an excerpt: The agency has filed more lawsuits against lawyers than almost any other group, according to an analysis by The National Law Journal, bringing six suits against legal services providers. Only the banking […]

More on “Company Doe” suit in Fourth Circuit

We have blogged about the "company Doe" suit a couple times, including here. That's the case in which a company sued to block the inclusion of a product report in the Consumer Product Safety Commission's publicly available, web-accessible database about potentially dangerous products. The district court permitted the company to litigate in secret and under […]

More from the FDA on generic drug labeling proposal

On Friday, we told you about FDA's proposal to authorize generic drug manufacturers to update labels to provide new warnings, just like brand-name manufacturers have been authorized to do since 1982. Janet Woodcock, the head of FDA's drug research and evaluation division, has written an essay in FDA Voice explaining why the agency wants the […]

FDA proposes rule to authorize generic drug manufacturers to update labels to provide new warnings (just like brand-name manufacturers are authorized to do)

In Wyeth v. Levine (2009), the Supreme Court held that the FDA's approval of the labeling for a brand-name prescription drug generally does not preempt a personal-injury state-law tort claim premised on the manufacturer's failure to warn about the drug. But, later, in PLIVA v. Mensing (2011), the Supreme Court held that state-law failure-to-warn claims […]

CFPB gets going on debt collection

by Brian Wolfman The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took two steps yesterday in the debt-collection realm. First, it began adding complaints about debt collection to its public consumer-complaint database. Second, it began the process of rulemaking for the debt-collection industry. The agency issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking seeking data on many issues, including the […]

The ACT and the College Board sued over alleged unlawful sale of test-takers’ private information

As Emily Babay of philly.com explains The companies that administer the SAT and ACT college entrance exams are being sued over their sales of students' personal information to outside parties. A lawsuit filed this week contends that the College Board, which  runs the SAT, and ACT, Inc., sell identifying information about the hundreds of thousands […]

Report: cash-for-clunkers (CARS) program not terribly efficient

by Brian Wolfman Remember the Obama Administration's early "stimulus" program known as cash-for-clunkers? The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009, or CARS, was meant to encourage people to trade in their gas guzzlers and buy new fuel-efficient cars. You traded in the gas guzzler, and the federal government funded a $3,500 to […]

Victims or fraudsters?: Telling them apart in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis

That's the name of this post published by Daniel Colbert in the American Criminal Law Review. Colbert's piece examines United States v. Phillips, a recent en banc decision from the Seventh Circuit that deals with the intersection of criminal law and mortgage fraud. Here's the piece:   By Daniel Colbert, ACLR Featured Blogger                     […]