So reports Corey G. Johnson of Pro Publica in FCC Officials Took Pricey Gifts From Paramount as the Company Needed Approval for Billion-Dollar Deals. That article focuses on the FCC’s regulation of the entertainment industry but the FCC also implements and interprets the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (which is not to say that the deals in question […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
So suggests an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Demise of Disparate-Impact Liability, which carries the subhed The Education Department’s decision to eliminate a civil-rights enforcement tool strikes some as hypocritical. Here’s an excerpt: [C]ritics say the administration is relying on the kind of statistical evidence used in disparate-impact cases to crack down on […]
Well, the Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on the nominee for CFPB director was ridiculously short. Senators got only five minutes to ask questions of three nominees for different agencies. How strange that people complain about the CFPB’s lack of accountability and then spend far less time publicly vetting the nominee to lead the Bureau than, […]
I have no inside information about CFPB director-nominee Brian Johnson’s prospects for confirmation, but unless at least one Republican senator on the Senate Banking Committee votes against his confirmation, he will move to a vote by the entire Senate even if every Committee Democrat votes against him. Two Republican members of the Committee–Senators Tillis and […]
Here. Funny how whenever someone argues for creation of a private claim for consumers, you hear opponents complain that the private claims will flood the courts but you never hear anyone say that these debt cases are flooding the courts. I wonder how much taxpayers are contributing to debt collection at this point.
Retired Chief Judge Susan G. Braden, formerly of the United States Court of Federal Claims, has written Quo Vadis—Federal Trade Commission? She argues that the Department of Justice should absorb the FTC. The paper was written before the Court decided Trump v. Slaughter but it anticipated the result. This proposal reminds me of how the […]
Online and in person at GW Law on August 3 from 9:00 to 12:30 with an all-star lineup of speakers. Registration is free. More information here.
Mark Bartholomew of Buffalo and Samuel Becher of the City University of Hong Kong have written a short opinion piece for the Regulatory Review: Consumer Protection Law Was Not Built for Robot Shoppers. Here are the first and last paragraphs: Imagine waking up to find that, while you slept, an artificial intelligence (AI) shopping agent […]
It’s not the biggest issue at the CFPB, but I really miss the old days of transparency. It’s hard to have any accountability if you don’t know what’s going on–or these days, not going on. This week, for the first time since he took over, Acting CFPB Director Vought will testify before Congress about the […]