Carolyn Dessin of Akron has written Arbitrability and Vulnerability, 21 Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, 349 (2012). Here's the abstract: Arbitration is cool. Everybody's doing it. In the eighty-five years since the passage of the Federal Arbitration Act, that seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Recent decades have seen the meteoric rise of […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
by Jeff Sovern You can read Senator Rubio's speech here. Here's the key language: "a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies." He doesn't specify the policies, but he's probably referring to the old, thoroughly debunked, claim that the CRA caused the subprime crisis, something the Republican presidential […]
Victimized by Credit Reports. An excerpt: Given the evidence, it is imperative that the federal government do more to make the credit-reporting process transparent and to protect consumers from errors that can drive up their borrowing costs and cause them to be denied jobs or be turned away by landlords. * * * * * […]
Quietly Killing a Consumer Watchdog. Excerpt: The consumer bureau has taken seriously its mandate to protect the public from the kinds of abuses that helped lead to the 2009 recession, and it has not been intimidated by the financial industry’s army of lobbyists. That’s what worries Republicans. They can’t prevent the bureau from regulating their […]
The symposium is scheduled for Feb. 28, 2013, 9:30 AM – 6:30 PM, at the UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SCHOOL OF LAW (registration by Feb. 26). The announcement states: Mandatory disclosure is a popular form of regulation. From privacy to healthcare, politics to “payola,” laws requiring disclosure have proliferated in recent decades. This symposium features panel discussions by top scholars […]
by Jeff Sovern Last Sunday, the Times published an article, Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart, which quoted the Commerce Department's general counsel, Cameron F. Kerry, as saying “The sum of the parts of U.S. privacy protection is equal to or greater than the single whole of Europe.” This is a remarkable assertion, given how […]
Derek E. Bambauer of Arizona has written Privacy Versus Security, forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Here is the abstract: Legal scholarship tends to conflate privacy and security. However, security and privacy can, and should, be treated as distinct concerns. Privacy discourse involves difficult normative decisions about competing claims to legitimate access […]
Here, but behind a paywall, unfortunately. Everyone agrees that the Credit CARD Act reduced some fees, but there is disagreement about whether it has increased the cost of and restricted access to credit. As you might expect, the industry still says yes and the consumer advocates still say no. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing […]
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 […]