by Jeff Sovern As we wrote about in May, the CFPB takes the position that it can use its unfairness power when consumer financial service companies discriminate. One issue that has arisen is whether when it does so, the Bureau will use the disparate effects test, sometimes called the disparate impact test, to determine if […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
From the CFP: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is soliciting academic-and policy-focused research on the impact of financial technology (fintech) entities and nonbanks on banking and the markets for lending, deposit-taking, and payment services through August 21, 2022. The OCC will invite authors of selected papers to present to OCC staff […]
Here. Excerpt: One possible compromise: The ADPPA could contain a preemption provision that would sunset after 5 or 10 years unless Congress would amend the law to renew the preemption term for another 5-10 years. This would force Congress to revisit the law in order to renew the preemption for another period.
Last year, we published a link to Daniel Wilf-Townsend's Harvard Law Review article Assembly-Line Plaintiffs. Now Jessica Steinberg of George Washington, Colleen F. Shanahan of Columbia, Anna E. Carpenter of Utah, and Alyx Mark of Wesleyan's Dept. of Government and the American Bar Foundation have written a response to it, The Democratic (Il)legitimacy of Assembly-Line […]
by Jeff Sovern Abstracts are due September 16. The conference will be at Berkeley on March 2-3, 2023. More information here. This is always one of the best consumer law conferences of the year so if you have a paper that will be ready to be workshopped next spring, I urge you to submit it.
by Jeff Sovern Here, behind a pay wall. Excerpt: At present, banks generally are only required to repay consumers for payments they didn’t authorize. The coming regulatory guidance could change that threshold by maintaining that fraudulently induced transactions, even those approved by the consumer, are considered unauthorized. That could require a bank to conduct more […]
by Jeff Sovern The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce has forwarded to the full committee a bipartisan bill (draft here, though perhaps not the version the subcommittee approved; section-by-section commentary here). The last I heard, Senator Cantwell, the Senate Commerce Committee chair, had not signed on, putting the bill's future […]
Bernard Chao of Denver has written Unjust Enrichment: Standing Up for Privacy Rights. Here is the abstract: In TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, one of the country’s largest credit reporting agencies violated the Federal Credit Report Act (“FCRA”) by failing to “follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy . . ..” As a result, thousands of […]
Vijay Raghavan of Brooklyn has written Shifting Burdens at the Fringe, 102 Boston University Law Review (2022). Here’s the abstract: Scholars are increasingly arguing that consumer law can be a site of distribution. This raises at least two concerns: the classic argument associated with Louis Kaplow & Steven Shavell against redistributing income through legal rules, […]
by Jeff Sovern When Congress enacted the Credit CARD Act of 2009, it provided that credit card penalty fees, like late fees, “shall be reasonable and proportional” and gave the Fed the power–later transferred to the CFPB–to set safe harbor amounts which would presumptively be reasonable and proportional. But it didn’t limit fees for credit […]