by Jeff Sovern Here. The article reports on the case on which we previously blogged in which a woman won an $18.6 million verdict under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. And it provides more support for the reforms Ira Rheingold and I argued for in our recent Times op-ed: requiring credit bureaus to be more […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Jeff Gelles has the story here. Maybe it's just as well that Sovereign Bank is changing its name to Santander; I wouldn't want to be confused with them.
by Jeff Sovern Sovereign Bank is changing its name to Santander, but I have decided not to change my name to Jeff Santander. I'm rather attached to my last name, which family lore claims came about when my grandfather and his three brothers decided to anglicize the family name. Previously, we had been the Smiths. […]
Here, along with an explanatory memo. We had previously blogged about this Do Not Track effort. Here's the abstract: This document contains the decision of the Tracking Protection Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, as issued in July, 2013 by the co-chairs, Peter Swire and Matthias Schunter, as well as a detailed […]
Here. The story is about consumer reports maintained on consumers' banking practices originally intended to bar fraud but that often result in banks denying accounts to low-income consumers because of bounced checks and similar blemishes.
International & Comparative Law Fellow Emanwel J. Turnbull at Maryland has written Account Stated Resurrected: The Fiction of Implied Assent in Consumer Debt Collection. Here's the abstract: When are modern American consumers like 17th century merchants? The answer is “now”. Often, in collection lawsuits, creditors allege that consumers in debt are liable for an “account […]
by Jeff Sovern A couple of weeks ago, Ira Rheingold and I had an op-ed in the Times about issues with credit reports. Almost on cue, the Associated Press reports Jury awards Oregon woman $18.6M over credit report. It seems she had been trying to get Equifax to correct errors for two years. In the op-ed, […]
by Jeff Sovern A personal rant. Even consumer law professors have consumer irritations. Cell phones, including smart phones, occasionally develop problems. In the past, when that has happened, I've stopped by a local store run by my cell service provider and they have fixed the problem fairly quickly. But last year I got an Iphone from […]
Ian Ayres of Yale, together with Jeff Lingwall and Sonia Steinway, have written Skeletons in the Database: An Early Analysis of the CFPB's Consumer Complaints. Here's the abstract: Analyzing a new data set of 110,000 consumer complaints lodged with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we find that (i) Bank of America, Citibank, and PNC Bank […]
by Jeff Sovern I just read a terrific article by Richard Craswell of Stanford, Static Versus Dynamic Disclosures, and How Not to Judge Their Success or Failure, 88 Washington Law Review 333 (2013). Here's the abstract: Disclosure laws can serve many different purposes. This Article is the first to distinguish two of those purposes, which […]