by Brian Wolfman The Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) provides jurisdiction in federal district court (originally and by removal) for most minimally diverse class actions and for so-called "mass actions." Under CAFA, a mass action is, as relevant to this post any civil action … in which monetary relief claims of 100 or more persons […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
The country suffers from continuing high unemployment. The current official unemployment rate is 7.4%. The real unemployment rate is considerably higher because some unemployed people have stopped looking for work and don't get counted as unemployed. So, that's a lot of unemployed people. The unemployed people looking for work have trouble finding it in part […]
In the three-and-half decades since enactment of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, airfares have plummeted in real terms. That reduction in price includes those dreaded fees for baggage, seat upgrades, etc., which make up only a small fraction of consumers' overall cost of travel. But beginning in 2009, fares began to creep up, as indicated […]
by Brian Wolfman We've been covering the congressional debate over interest rates on students loans. (Go, for instance, here and here.) On Friday, President Obama signed the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013. It will bring most undergraduate loan rates below 4%. (Those rates were at 3.4% before July 1, when they doubled because Congress […]
As this story in the Guardian explains, Wal-Mart has agreed in a settlement to pay the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration a 190K fine and to improve worker safety at 2,800 of its stores. Here's an excerpt: Walmart has agreed to improve safety conditions at more than 2,800 stores in 28 US states after […]
That's the name of this opinion piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel. It piece says that, in the U.S., "[a]s of 2011, nearly half the students enrolled in four-year programs — and more than 70 percent of students in two-year programs — failed to earn their degrees within that time, with many dropping out because of […]
We have been following the litigation over swipe fees–the fees that the card companies impose on merchants each time a credit or debit card is used. Go, for instance, here and here. A major concern is that if part of the swipe fee is the product of anti-competitive behavior or legislation or regulation enacted at the behest […]
That's the name of this new report Public Citizen. Here's Public Citizen's description of the report: A decade after reaching their peak, the quantity and cumulative value of medical malpractice payments made on behalf of doctors were at their lowest level on record in 2012, according to a new Public Citizen analyzing data from the […]
Banks don't like to offer 30-year mortages unless someone else is left holding the bag if the homeowner can't pay. That's just too long a period to depend on repayment and market stability. But a 30-year payback period, all other things equal, helps many non-wealthy consumers buy homes. Banks will make 30-year loans if the […]
That's the name of this lengthy piece by Paul Kiel of ProPublica. It focuses on an effort in Missouri to cap the rates on payday loans. Here's a short excerpt: Outrage over payday loans, which trap millions of Americans in debt and are the best-known type of high-cost loans, has led to dozens of state […]