Author Archives: Jeff Sovern

House GOP Committee Attacks CFPB Head Cordray for Attending State of the Union Address

by Jeff Sovern I kid you not. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Darrell Issa, and its Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs, chaired by longtime CFPB foe Patrick McHenry, has issued a report titled THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU’S THREAT TO CREDIT ACCESS IN THE UNITED STATES.  Here […]

Calo’s Against Notice Skepticism

by Jeff Sovern I've moved on to the privacy chapter of our casebook, and in that regard I just finished reading M. Ryan Calo's (Calo is at the University of Washington and affilated with Stanford)  intriguing Against Notice Skepticism In Privacy (And Elsewhere), 87 Notre Dame Law Review 1027 (2012).  Before I add my two […]

Richard Frankel Paper on Arbitration Clauses

Richard Frankel of Drexel has written The Arbitration Clause as Super Contract.  Here's the abstract: It is widely acknowledged that the purpose of the Federal Arbitration Act was to place arbitration clauses on “equal footing” with other contracts. Nonetheless,federal and state courts have placed arbitration clauses on a pedestal by creating special interpretive rules for […]

CFPB Announces Proposed Policy for Letting Companies Test Disclosure Programs

by Jeff Sovern Here.  The idea is that a company can apply to the Bureau for permission to try different disclosures and the disclosures can then be evaluated, and perhaps adopted.  In its statement announcing the proposal, the Bureau says: When deciding whether or not to grant a company a waiver from current disclosure requirements, the […]

Major CFPB Report on Credit Reporting Agencies

by Jeff Sovern Here.  Two points from the Executive Summary, though there's quite a bit more than this:  The NCRAs have created an automated system for handling consumer disputes and forwarding them to data furnishers. Through this automated system – called e-OSCAR – the NCRAs provide furnishers with one or two numeric codes indicating the […]

Engel & Mccoy on Preemption After Dodd-Frank

Kathleen C. Engel of Suffolk Patricia A. McCoy of Connecticut have written Federal Preemption and Consumer Financial Protection: Past and Future, 3 Banking & Financial Services Policy Report 25 (2012).  Here is the abstract: Many states and cities filled the void by passing anti-predatory lending laws of their own. Lenders, worried about potential liability, quickly organized a […]

American Banker: Lobbying CFPB on Arbitration Intensifies

Here (login required).  An excerpt: Likewise, there was initially deep skepticism inside the banking industry about the CFPB's arbitration study, and there is still a belief among industry insiders that the agency's research is likely to lead to new regulations. * * * But over the last few months, industry observers have been relatively pleasedwith they […]

Disclosure vs. Regulation

by Jeff Sovern Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a Ph.D candidate from the University of Amsterdam, Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, who is researching privacy regulation and behavioral targeting. He asked me if I could refer him to a book that explores when disclosure is an appropriate response to consumer protection problems […]