Last year, my co-author, Nahal Heydari, and I posted on SSRN a draft of our article, Not-So-Smartphone Disclosures, forthcoming in the Arkansas Law Review. We recently posted a new draft of the piece. The earlier draft reported, among other things, that consumers understood credit card disclosures less well on smartphones than on laptops and desktops […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
In June, George Mason professor Todd Zywicki testified before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Consumer Protection Subcommittee on junk fees. Professor Zywicki explained: I share the frustration that many consumers hold today regarding the proliferation of seemingly ubiquitous add-on fees that we experience constantly, from surcharges for using our credit cards at a merchant, to hotel […]
Tim Samples of the University of Georgia – Terry College of Business, Katherine Ireland of the University of Georgia Libraries, and Caroline Kraczon, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have written TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2023). Here’s an excerpt from the article about […]
Evan Weinberger has a report at Bloomberg Law (possibly behind paywall), as does Kate Berry at the American Banker (also behind paywall), and Reuters. Here’s an excerpt from the Bloomberg Law report: The coming proposal would seek to ban the sale of consumer data, including so-called “credit-header data” like a person’s name, address, or Social […]
Consumer law was a big campaign issue for a while in the wake of the Great Recession, and it may be again next year. AP’s Will Weissert has the story in an article headlined Biden and House Democrats hope to make curbing ‘junk fees’ a winning issue in 2024.
Yonathan A. Arbel of Alabama and Samuel Becher of the Victoria University of Wellington have written How Smart are Smart Readers? LLMs and the Future of the No-Reading Problem. Here’s the abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to summarize and simplify complex texts. In this study, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art models […]
Ballard Spahr’s Alan Kaplinsky interviewed Arthur E. Wilmarth, Professor Emeritus at GW, about crypto and its regulation at this week’s episode of the Consumer Finance Monitor podcast. I learned some things from the discussion that I plan to incorporate in my Payments Systems class next spring. Some of the discussion drew on Professor Wilmarth’s forthcoming […]
Here. Entries are due November 1. There’s a student category and a professional category.
Claire Johnson Raba of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law and California, Irvine has written One-Sided Litigation: Lessons from Civil Docket Data in California Debt Collection Lawsuits. Here’s the abstract: A study by Claire Johnson Raba, a researcher with the Debt Collection Lab, shows that debt cases are an increasing burden on consumers and […]
Last month, the FTC updated its Endorsements Guide. The Guide’s definition of clear and conspicuous is particularly interesting. The Guide states: (f) For purposes of this part, “clear and conspicuous” means that a disclosure is difficult to miss ( i.e., easily noticeable) and easily understandable by ordinary consumers. * * * In any communication using […]