Author Archives: Jeff Sovern

Mark Totten Paper on Credit Reform and State Attorneys General

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 […]

Study Finds Racial Discrimination in Google Searches

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 […]

Paper Finds Evidence of Mortgage Originators Steering Borrowers to Subprime Loans in 2000s

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 […]

Fordham Law Conference to Include Consumer Law Panel

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 […]

More on the Republicans and the CFPB

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 […]

Kent Barnett Paper on Separation of Powers Litigation

Kent H.Barnett of Georgia has written To the Victor Goes the Toil–Remedies for Regulated Parties in Separation-of-Powers Litigation, in which he mentions the Big Spring case over the validity of the president's recess appointments, including to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Here's the abstract: The U.S. Constitution imposes three key limits on the design of […]

American Banker Slideshow on Financial Institution Spending on Lobbying

Here.  The lead: "Many of the nation's largest financial institutions lowered their spending on lobbying the federal government in 2012, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics." Still, as the slideshow makes clears, many of the largest financial institutions individually spent millions on lobbying last year.  I wonder if all the consumer […]