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 […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
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.
Tara Twomey of the National Consumer Law Center and National Consumer Bankruptcy Rights Center has written Crossing Paths: The Intersection of Reverse Mortgages and Bankruptcy. Here is the abstract: The senior population of the United States is expected to grow rapidly over the next twenty years. Rather than enjoying their golden years, increasingly older Americans […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. Eleven proposed bills this time. It creates an interesting contrast with the just issued CFPB's Supervisory Highlights report, which reports, for example, that the CFPB found that one collection firm violated debt collection laws approximately 17,000 times and a creditor has been selling debts on which consumers were no longer liable. […]
Here. A lot of it is about Omri Ben-Shahar's and Carl Schneider's new book, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure. I'm still reading the book's introduction, but so far it looks very good.
Chris Jay Hoofnagle of Berkeley has written How the Fair Credit Reporting Act Regulates Big Data for the Future of Privacy Forum Workshop on Big Data and Privacy: Making Ends Meet, 2013. Here is the abstract: This short essay, prepared for the Future of Privacy Forum's Big Data and Privacy: Making Ends Meet event in […]
Stephen J. Ware of Kansas has written A 20th Century Debate About Imprisonment for Debt. Here's the abstract: In the early twentieth century, Parliament debated whether to abolish imprisonment for debt. Parliament’s Select Committee on Debtors (Imprisonment) of 1909 heard testimony from witnesses and issued a report recommending the continuation of imprisonment for debt. This […]