Tess Wilkinson‐Ryan of Penn has written A Psychological Account of Consent to Fine Print, 99 Iowa Law Review 1745 (2014). Wilkinson-Ryan has a Ph.D in psychology as well as a law degree, and so brings to bear a different perspective in evaluating consumer reactions to fine print. I found this article useful in the research I'm […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
by Jeff Sovern Last March, the CFPB Monitor Blog, announced that "a group of representatives from across a variety of industries met to discuss the formation of a Research Integrity Council (RIC), the purpose of which will be to make recommendations to improve the quality and veracity of the research being conducted by the CFPB […]
by Jeff Sovern Our casebook includes a problem raising the question of whether discrimination against same sex couples in the granting of credit violates ECOA (some states have statutes explicitly barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, see, e.g., N.Y. Exec. L. 296-a(1)(a), and a HUD rule bars discrimination on the basis of sexual […]
Brian posted earlier about the Supreme Court's POM Wonderful decision but I thought readers of the blog might also be interested in the views of my co-author, Dee Pridgen: POM Wonderful, the makers of pomegranate juice dietary supplement products, scored a big victory in the U S Supreme Court today The Court ruled 7-0 (with Justice […]
by Jeff Sovern That's the question raised by my letter in the Times. Here's the relevant portion of the letter: Candice Anderson was charged with manslaughter and ultimately pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide for an accident leading to the death of her boyfriend. Now that G.M. has concluded that the accident was caused not by […]
by Jeff Sovern A lot has happened in consumer law in the last half-dozen years: To name only some of the highlights. consumer protection failures contributed to the Great Recession; Congress passed the Credit CARD Act in 2009 and the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010; Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has in turn […]
Daniel A. Austin of Northeastern has written Student Loan Debt in Bankruptcy: An Empirical Assessment, forthcoming in the Suffolk Law Review. Here's the abstract: Education loan debt in the U.S. recently reached $1.2 trillion. Thirty-nine million Americans — nearly 20% of U.S. households — owe student loans, and student loans are by far the fastest […]
Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jennifer M. Urban, both of Berkeley, have written Alan Westin's Privacy Homo Economicus, 49 Wake Forest Law Review 261 (2014). Here's the abstract: Homo economicus reliably makes an appearance in regulatory debates concerning information privacy. Under the still-dominant U.S. “notice and choice” approach to consumer information privacy, the rational consumer is […]
by Jeff Sovern Here, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
32 feet, according to Omri Ben-Shahar's and Carl E. Schneider's new book, More Than You Wanted to Know. To see a picture of the contract hanging from the ceiling of the Chicago Law School library two stories up (and it more than reaches the ground), watch the video here.