by Jeff Sovern Last Sunday, the Times published an article, Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart, which quoted the Commerce Department's general counsel, Cameron F. Kerry, as saying “The sum of the parts of U.S. privacy protection is equal to or greater than the single whole of Europe.” This is a remarkable assertion, given how […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Derek E. Bambauer of Arizona has written Privacy Versus Security, forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Here is the abstract: Legal scholarship tends to conflate privacy and security. However, security and privacy can, and should, be treated as distinct concerns. Privacy discourse involves difficult normative decisions about competing claims to legitimate access […]
Here, but behind a paywall, unfortunately. Everyone agrees that the Credit CARD Act reduced some fees, but there is disagreement about whether it has increased the cost of and restricted access to credit. As you might expect, the industry still says yes and the consumer advocates still say no. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing […]
Mark Totten of Michigan State has written Credit Reform and the States: The Vital Role of Attorneys General after Dodd-Frank. Here's the abstract: Congress employed multiple strategies in the wake of the Great Recession to provide greater protections for consumers in the financial marketplace. One strategy aimed at agency design and resulted in creation of […]
Here. Of those, 250 were made by Republican presidents. Some of the supposedly unlawful appointments were of Court of Appeals judges. (HT: Barbara Traub)
Latanya Sweeney, Professor of Government and Technology in Residence at Harvard University, has written Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery. Here's the abstract: A Google search for a person's name, such as “Trevon Jones”, may yield a personalized ad for public records about Trevon that may be neutral, such as “Looking for Trevon Jones? …”, or […]
Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore and Douglas D. Evanoff of the Chicago Fed have written Loan Product Steering in Mortgage Market. Here's the abstract: Accusations of unscrupulous lender behavior — e.g., predatory lending — abounded during the housing boom of the 2000s. Such behavior is said to have generated significant social costs […]
Here. This should be read by anyone interested in consumer protection.
The conference is titled ""What is Urban Law Today? A Symposium on the Field’s Past, Present, and Future in Honor of the Urban Law Journal’s 40th Anniversary. It will be be held on February 28, 2013 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus. The consumer law panel, on consumer protection by local governments, is scheduled for 2:10pm-3:00pm. Speakers […]
So much is being written about Republican opposition to confirmation of the CFPB's director, Richard Cordray, that it's hard to keep up with it all. But a couple of recent pieces pull a lot together and are worth a look. One is Nobel Laureate and Times columnist Paul Krugman's op-ed yesterday, Friends of Fraud, about […]