Andrea J. Boyack of Washburn has written The Shape of Consumer Contracts, Denver Law Review (2023 Forthcoming). Here is the abstract: Modern consumer contracts are the bane of contract law and theory. Freedom of contract justifications are premised on party autonomy and transactional efficiency, but theories justifying contract enforcement fail to explain why the law should […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
As Adam Pulver noted earlier, the Chamber of Commerce won its challenge at the district court level to the CFPB’s determination that discrimination is unfair within the meaning of the CFPB’s UDAAP statute. It is, of course, no coincidence that the Chamber filed the case in Texas, where it was heard by Judge J. Campbell […]
The DOJ press release is here. The emails are disturbing (see for yourself below) and are reminiscent of the Trident case. The case resulted in a consent order though, as is usual in such cases, the bank neither admitted nor denied the complaint’s substantive allegations. What makes this even more upsetting is that bank trade […]
Here. I particularly enjoyed this episode of the podcast. Alan Kaplinsky conducted the interview.
An Uber driver agrees to Uber’s standard form contract, which includes an arbitration clause. The arbitration clause permits drivers to opt out within 30 days, and the driver does so. So the driver can never be forced into arbitration with Uber, right? Wrong. Greg Gauthier recently pointed me to a case from the Eastern District […]
We have been asked to announce the following webinar (I am definitely looking forward to hearing this one): The U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in CFSA v. CFPB: Who Will Win and What Does It Mean?A special webinar roundtable featuring analysis of the oral argument by several renowned attorneys who filed amicus briefs on all sides […]
Last year, my co-author, Nahal Heydari, and I posted on SSRN a draft of our article, Not-So-Smartphone Disclosures, forthcoming in the Arkansas Law Review. We recently posted a new draft of the piece. The earlier draft reported, among other things, that consumers understood credit card disclosures less well on smartphones than on laptops and desktops […]
In June, George Mason professor Todd Zywicki testified before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Consumer Protection Subcommittee on junk fees. Professor Zywicki explained: I share the frustration that many consumers hold today regarding the proliferation of seemingly ubiquitous add-on fees that we experience constantly, from surcharges for using our credit cards at a merchant, to hotel […]
Tim Samples of the University of Georgia – Terry College of Business, Katherine Ireland of the University of Georgia Libraries, and Caroline Kraczon, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have written TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2023). Here’s an excerpt from the article about […]
Evan Weinberger has a report at Bloomberg Law (possibly behind paywall), as does Kate Berry at the American Banker (also behind paywall), and Reuters. Here’s an excerpt from the Bloomberg Law report: The coming proposal would seek to ban the sale of consumer data, including so-called “credit-header data” like a person’s name, address, or Social […]