Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Here. Excerpt: Greed is undermining class actions, according to Ted Frank, founder and director of the Center for Class Action Fairness in Washington. Consumer and other class settlements often pay more to trial lawyers than to their clients, Frank says, and he's devoted his professional life to fighting that trend. Frank is an objector—a lawyer […]
Chris Jay Hoofnagle of Berkeley has written Assessing the Federal Trade Commission's Privacy Assessments, 14(2) IEEE Security & Privacy 58–64 (Mar/Apr. 2016). Here is the abstract: Consumer protection regulators worldwide share basic problems: the companies that regulators police are so powerful and rich that fines do not matter. Consider the French with their €150,000 fine […]
Oren Bar-Gill of Harvard and Kevin E. Davis of NYU have written (Mis)perceptions of Law in Consumer Markets. Here's the abstract: There are good reasons to believe that consumers’ behavior is sometimes influenced by systematic misperceptions of legal norms that govern product quality. Consumers might misperceive specific rules, such as those found in food safety […]
From Politico's Morning Money, by Ben White: M.M. hosted a panel at the ABA conference on Wednesday that generated some controversy when Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, said people needed to "find a way to neuter" Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whom he called "the Darth Vader of […]
We have received the following Call for Papers: The three Consumer-Protection related committees of the ABA Antitrust Section (Consumer Protection, Privacy, and Advertising Disputes & Litigation Committees) are excited to announce a new initiative geared towards young lawyers and law students interested in the consumer protection and privacy fields – an opportunity to get published […]
House Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling gave a speech today to the American Bankers Association Frank Act. During the speech, he said the following about the CFPB: [T]hey’re certainly not helped when Obama’s Financial Control Law [his name for the Dodd-Frank Act that created the CFPB, among other things] has killed off a benefit many, […]
by Jeff Sovern I recently listened to the audio version of a book authored, by two Nobel Prize winners, George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller, titled Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception. Their basic thesis is that while free markets have the salutary effect of encouraging sellers to provide things that consumers want, free […]
Maybe not, according to this NY Times article. Excerpt: [S]ome argue that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has become perhaps the most business-friendly court in recent history. A 2013 study by Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis, William M. Landes of the University of Chicago Law School and […]
Here. It's mostly about Florida Representative and Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's proposal to derail the CFPB's possible payday lending rule that Brian blogged about a few days ago. Excerpt: [Wasserman's] spokesman, Sean Bartlett, said the legislation "is about preserving the shared goal of implementing strong consumer protections while also preserving access to […]