by Jeff Sovern I'm listening to the audio version of David Dayan's book Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud. A lot of it will be familiar to those who followed media reports of the foreclosure crisis and robo-signing, but having it all pulled together gives it considerable impact, and those who didn't […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Ari Ezra Waldman of New York Law has written Manipulating Trust on Facebook, 29 Loyola Consumer Law Review. Here is the abstract: Facebook is built on gathering massive amounts of information from its users. To maximize the data it collects, Facebook relies on the trust we have in our friends to encourage us to share […]
by Jeff Sovern The current issue of Consumer Reports cover reads "I kind of ruined my life by going to college." Consumer Reports teamed with RevealNews.org to cover student loans. You can read the RevealNews.org coverage here. Here's the upsetting beginning: A generation ago, Congress privatized a student loan program intended to give more Americans access […]
by Jeff Sovern In his new book, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy, Chris Hoofnagle writes (at page 137) about a 1971 petition by five GW law students to the FTC. The students urged the Commission to bar companies from making unsubstantiated claims and to require that chemically identical products be labeled to indicate […]
Stephen J. Ware of Kansas has written The Politics of Arbitration Law and Centrist Proposals for Reform, 53 Harvard Journal on Legislation (2016). Here is the abstract: Arbitration law in the United States is far more controversial when applied to individuals than to businesses. While enforcement of arbitration agreements between businesses sometimes raises legal issues that […]
SCOTUSBLOG coverage here and here. Reuters reports here. The Reuters lead reads: "The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether Miami can pursue lawsuits accusing major banks of predatory mortgage lending to black and Hispanic home buyers resulting in loan defaults that drove down city tax revenues and property values." HousingWire has more […]
Here. Excerpt: * * * Affected businesses are likely to sue (in court, ironically) to try to block [the CFPB arbitration proposal]. In a move that conjures up the famous scene from “Blazing Saddles” in which Cleavon Little takes himself hostage, the financial industry has threatened to abandon consumer arbitration altogether if the regulation takes […]
Jane R. Bambauer, Jonathan D. Loe, and D. Alex Winkelman, all of Arizona have written A Bad Education, 2016 University of Illinois Law Review ___ (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract: Mandated disclosure laws achieve their regulatory goals by educating the public about latent attributes of a product or service. At their best, they improve the accuracy of […]
by Jeff Sovern Hensarling calls the bill the Financial Choice Act. Make America Great for Banks Act is closer to the truth. Based on a quick look, the bill would give bank lobbyists power over the CFPB by subjecting it to the appropriations process, increase the likelihood of deadlocks by turning the Bureau into a commission, […]