FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra and his attorney-advisor Samuel A.A. Levine have wiritten The Case for Resurrecting the FTC Act’s Penalty Offense Authority. Here is the abstract: This article details why the Federal Trade Commission should resurrect one of the key authorities it abandoned in the 1980s: Section 5(m)(1)(B) of the FTC Act, the Penalty Offense […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
by Jeff Sovern Here. Which one do you think consumers are more likely to read? To understand? (HT: ContractsProf Blog)
Amy Widman of Rutgers has written Protecting Consumer Protection: Filling the Federal Enforcement Gap, 69 Buffalo Law Review __ (2021) (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract: Since 2014, when a first-of-its-kind empirical study looked at how public enforcers use their authority under UDAP laws, the enforcement landscape has changed. Most notably, the Trump Administration has weakened […]
On Saturday, we posted links to consumer advocates' reactions to the CFPB's new debt collection rules. Want to know how the industry sees the regulations, at least at first? Go here, to AccountsRecovery.net. Here's a hint: "there appeared to be no provisions or restrictions in the rule that should cause collection agencies to lose a […]
The new rules are here. NACA and other groups, calling the rules a "mixed bag for consumers," comment here. Consumer Reports ("CFPB rules fail to protect consumers from abusive debt collection harassment") comments here. The Bureau said it intends to issue more rules in December.
West has published the fifth edition of Dee Pridgen's Consumer Protection Law in a Nutshell, the best short introduction to consumer protection law and an extremely useful volume for students and practitioners alike (disclosure: I commented on the manuscript of the fourth edition and coauthor a casebook with Dee). Here are some of the bigger […]
Yehuda Adar of the University of Haifa and Shmuel I. Becher of the Victoria University of Wellington have written Taking Boilerplate Seriously: Tackling Exploitation in Consumer Contracts. Here's the abstract: This Article calls for a conceptual shift toward the scrutiny of exploitative consumer standard form contracts. Current approaches to consumer standard form contracts assume that imbalanced […]
Berkeley Law seeks applications for the full-time position of Executive Director (Academic Coordinator II) for the Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice (CLEJ) with an anticipated start date of December 1, 2020. This is a two-year, full-time (100%) appointment, subject to renewal. This position is open until filled. For more information about the position, […]