Author Archives: Jeff Sovern

Is the Trump administration using disparate impact litigation while attacking it?

So suggests an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Demise of Disparate-Impact Liability, which carries the subhed The Education Department’s decision to eliminate a civil-rights enforcement tool strikes some as hypocritical. Here’s an excerpt:  [C]ritics say the administration is relying on the kind of statistical evidence used in disparate-impact cases to crack down on […]

CFPB Director-Nominee refuses to commit to notifying Congress about White House calls to aid donors

Well, the Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on the nominee for CFPB director was ridiculously short. Senators got only five minutes to ask questions of three nominees for different agencies. How strange that people complain about the CFPB’s lack of accountability and then spend far less time publicly vetting the nominee to lead the Bureau than, […]

What can consumer advocates get out of CFPB nominee Johnson’s confirmation hearing?

I have no inside information about CFPB director-nominee Brian Johnson’s prospects for confirmation, but unless at least one Republican senator on the Senate Banking Committee votes against his confirmation, he will move to a vote by the entire Senate even if every Committee Democrat votes against him. Two Republican members of the Committee–Senators Tillis and […]

Conservative retired judge calls for moving FTC into DOJ

Retired Chief Judge Susan G. Braden, formerly of the United States Court of Federal Claims, has written Quo Vadis—Federal Trade Commission? She argues that the Department of Justice should absorb the FTC. The paper was written before the Court decided Trump v. Slaughter but it anticipated the result. This proposal reminds me of how the […]

Bartholomew & Becher on AI Shopping Agents

Mark Bartholomew of Buffalo and Samuel Becher of the City University of Hong Kong have written a short opinion piece for the Regulatory Review: Consumer Protection Law Was Not Built for Robot Shoppers. Here are the first and last paragraphs: Imagine waking up to find that, while you slept, an artificial intelligence (AI) shopping agent […]

Berkeley Consumer Law Scholars Conference Call for Abstracts

We received the following call for abstracts: We are pleased to announce the Ninth Annual Consumer Law Scholars Conference will be held in Berkeley on Thursday and Friday, March 4-5, 2027! Please save the date! The purpose of the CLSC is to support in-progress scholarship, foster a community of consumer law scholars, and build connections with scholars in other disciplines who […]