Back in February, Gregory Gauthier wondered why Starbucks changed its arbitration clause. Now, he writes: I was looking through the Q2 2016 Consumer Arbitration Statistics for the American Arbitration Association, and I found a case filed against Starbucks on January 18, 2016 (case #011600001646, row 5053). The Colorado pro se consumer in that case brought […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
by Jeff Sovern Brian posted this morning on the CFPB's debt collection proposal. I wanted to focus just on the validation requirements. Appendix F to the Bureau's proposal speaks to the validation notice. The Proposal indicates that the Bureau has conducted and continues to conduct extensive consumer testing of validation notices. I don't know what […]
More information here. Here's a quote from the announcement (some may disagree with the first nine words but the rest is exciting): Best place to live and teach in the U.S.: The Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana, the only law school in the state, anticipates hiring a full-time, tenure-track professor […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. It has more information than the article abstract, but is a lot shorter than the article. The article itself is here. In other debt collection news, Law360.com has its preview of the debt collection rules here (behind paywall). The headline: CFPB Enforcement Actions Could Guide Debt Collection Rules. UPDATE: InsideARM.com reports […]
The American Banker (behind paywall) and Bloomberg report speculations.
by Jeff Sovern We now have reason to believe that validation notices fail to convey to consumers the information Congress wants consumers to have. If the CFPB addresses validation notices in its regulation, courts can simply follow the Bureau's lead. But it could be years before that regulation takes effect. What should courts do in the […]
Christopher T. Robertson of Arizona and Harvard's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics has written A Trojan Horse? How Expansion of the First Amendment Threatens Much More than the Regulation of Off-Label Drugs, forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal. Here is the abstract: Scholars, advocates, and courts have begun to recognize […]
by Jeff Sovern We need to make some revisions to our validation article discussion draft, in Part V A.1., beginning on page 27, and captioned "Did Respondents Understand that The Letter Said They Could Dispute the Validity of the Debt?" Consequently, please don't use that part of the article until the new version is on the web. […]
Here. Here's the beginning of the Executive Summary: Lenders normally want borrowers who will pay back their loans in full. This seems obvious—otherwise, won’t the lender lose money? Yet in the high-rate installment loan market, the normal incentive to make affordable loans does not work. When loans have high interest rates, lenders may seek out […]
Daria Roithmayr of USC, Justin Chin, a USC law student, and Bruce Levin, an Emory biology professor, have written Cat and Mouse: A Dynamic Analysis of Predatory Payday Lending. Here's the abstract: Legal actors and the regulators who pursue them often engage in a co-evolutionary game of cat and mouse, as each innovates to out-compete […]