Here. Excerpt: Not just in Utah, but in Virginia and Washington, and Minnesota, tech companies have provided draft language that led to the introduction of industry-friendly privacy bills, according to legislators The Markup interviewed and previous reporting by Protocol. Big Tech funded nonprofits like TechNet, the State Privacy and Security Coalition, and the Internet Association have […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
John P. Hunt of UC-Davis has written The Failed Legal Case Against Student Debt Jubilee. Here is the abstract: This paper reviews and rebuts the arguments presented to date that the Executive lacks authority to engage in mass student loan cancellation. Legality skeptics have presented no compelling argument that the relevant statutory text, which authorizes the […]
The Federal Trade Commission has issued a call for research presentations on a wide range of privacy and data security topics such as commercial surveillance and automated decision making for its annual PrivacyCon event, which will take place virtually on November 1, 2022. PrivacyCon 2022 will bring together a diverse group of stakeholders to discuss […]
by Jeff Sovern I am grateful to Alan Kaplinsky for commenting on two of my earlier posts, Whither Arbitration Regulation? and Why the CFPB is right that it can act against discrimination using its unfairness power. One of Alan’s posts is titled Why the CFPB’s expansion of its UDAAP authority to target discrimination requires rulemaking. In the other […]
Aaron L. Nielson of Brigham Young has written What Happens If the FTC Becomes a Serious Rulemaker? forthcoming in FTC's Rᴜʟᴇᴍᴀᴋɪɴɢ Aᴜᴛʜᴏʀɪᴛʏ (Concurrences 2022). Here's the abstract: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is no one’s idea of a serious rulemaker. To the contrary, the FTC is in many respects a law enforcement agency that operates […]
We received the following call for papers: Nikita Aggarwal, Matt Bruckner, Kathleen Engel and Cre Johnson are putting together proposals for a symposium on AI, Consumer Credit, and Discrimination. They are applying to multiple law reviews on a rolling basis. If you have a project that fits within the proposed topic and are interested in […]
Here is the announcement: University of Pretoria International Consumer Law Conference (UPICLC 2022) Since the first UPICLC conference in 2014, the University of Pretoria Consumer Protection Law Cluster has attempted to propagate and address various consumer issues and trends on a national, regional and international scale. Through the years there have been consistent collaborative efforts […]
Hosted by The College of New Jersey School of Business on June 10th / 11th 2022. From the conference website: "This virtual conference brings together expertise from regulators, prosecutors, former MLM distributors, social media consumer advocates, researchers, educators, and journalists to discuss ways to improve consumer protection and reduce consumer harm within the multi-level marketing […]
by Jeff Sovern Every six months, the CFPB director testifies before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee. Each committee member gets five minutes to question the director, a process that collectively takes hours and this last time covered a wide variety of topics, including topics over which the CFPB lacks power, […]
Here’s the job posting: Director of the CLASS Network – Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice Do you want to work every day to advance the rights of low-income consumers? Do you want to help create a national network of law school programs dedicated to building equity and economic justice? Well, then, perhaps this […]

