Author Archives: Jeff Sovern

CHE essay on how for-profit colleges trick students and student loan forgiveness

The essay, by Mark Rivett, who both attended a for-profit college and taught at one, is titled I was Trapped in For-Profit College Hell (behind paywall). It’s subtitle is “Predatory schools tricked students like me into assuming huge debt for worthless credit.” Here’s the beginning: “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject […]

What does the 7th Circuit’s Townstone decision tell us about delegations to the CFPB after Loper Bright?

Adam blogged earlier about Townstone but I wanted to say a bit more about what the case tells us about the CFPB’s authority concerning TILA and ECOA. As Adam noted, the Seventh Circuit cited Loper Bright and stated in note 15 that it approached the case “as presenting a question of statutory interpretation subject to […]

JPMorgan Chase threatens to end free checking

So reports WSJ’s Alexander Saeedy (behind paywall). Excerpt: [Chase executive Marianne] Lake is warning that new rules that would cap overdraft and late fees will make everyday banking significantly more expensive for all Americans. Lake said Chase is planning to pass on the costs of higher regulation and charge customers for a number of now-free services, including checking […]

Crootof paper on the legal consequences of repossessions by cars that autonomously drive back to the lender

Rebecca Crootof of Richmond Law and the Yale Information Society Project has written Remote Repossession, 73 DePaul Law Review, (forthcoming 2024). Here’s the abstract: Ford’s February 2023 patent application raises a new possibility: that after a default, an internet-connected vehicle might autonomously drive itself off of the owner’s premises—to a public space, to the repossession agency, […]

Does Loper Bright limit the CFPB’s power?

As I noted in yesterday’s post, Loper Bright preserves agency authority when Congress authorized the agency to exercise discretion. Loper Bright cited as an example of such a case Michigan v. EPA, in which, Loper Bright noted, Congress used a term or phrase that gives agencies flexibility, “such as ‘appropriate’ or ‘reasonable.” Now let’s look […]

How much deference must courts give federal consumer protection agency determinations that conduct is unfair after Loper Bright?

Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided Loper Bright, in which it proclaimed that “Chevron is overruled.” But now we have to figure out what that means in particular contexts. One such context is federal consumer protection agency UDAAP statutes, like the FTC Act and Consumer Financial Protection Act. When those statutes give the agencies the power […]

Call for Abstracts for the Consumer Law Scholars Conference

We received the following Call for Abstracts for the Consumer Law Scholars Conference, always an important event for consumer law scholars: We are pleased to announce the seventh annual Consumer Law Scholars Conference (CLSC), which will be held Thursday and Friday, March 6-7, 2025 at Boston University. Save the date! The purpose of the CLSC is to support in-progress scholarship, foster […]

The Biden-Trump debate and consumer protection

Will consumer protection come up during the debate? My guess is not. It seems unlikely that a moderator or President Trump would raise it. I could see President Biden bringing up junk fees, as he has called for their regulation, in response to a question, though I am not expecting it. The headline issues have […]

Strahilevitz & Liu paper offers theory for Article III standing in data breach cases

Lior Strahilevitz of Chicago and Lisa Yao Liu of the Columbia Business School have written Cash Substitution and Deferred Consumption as Data Breach Harms. Here’s the abstract: Federal courts have long been divided over whether consumers whose data are breached suffer an “injury in fact” that gives them standing to sue under Article III of the […]