More information here. Here’s an excerpt: Consumers must be given a meaningful opportunity to choose how to proceed when disputes arise. Take-it-or-leave-it terms and conditions imposed in a consumer contract, through use of a product, or by signing up for a service does not allow that opportunity. Restoring consumers’ ability to make the choice about […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
I wrote The FAA Should Not Cover Consumer Claims, to appear in The Federal Arbitration Act: Successes, Failures, and a Roadmap for Reform (Richard A. Bales & Jill I. Gross eds., forthcoming 2024 Cambridge University Press). Here is the abstract: Consumer protection laws face a fundamental enforcement issue: because consumer claims are typically for small […]
As regular readers of the blog know, last month some 160 law academics filed with the CFPB a comment supporting the issuance of a new arbitration regulation (disclosure: I served on the drafting committee). Mark J. Levin & Alan S. Kaplinsky of Ballard Spahr recently posted a critique of the law professor comment on the Consumer Finance […]
When Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it tried to insulate it from the political branches. Critics of the Bureau have fought to eliminate that insulation. For example, industry actors asserted that the president should have the power to fire the CFPB director without cause, a position that the Supreme Court agreed with in […]
From time to time at a gathering of consumer law folks, I poll participants about whether they read consumer law contracts and disclosures. Here, for example, are the results of a survey of consumer law professors asked those questions. Earlier this year, I surveyed the audience at a consumer financial services lawyers, some of whose […]
Reuters’s Allson Frankel has the story here, and also reports on industry opposition. The original petition, as well as the comments, can be read here. Here’s an excerpt from the law professor comment (disclosure: I served on the drafting committee): Multiple studies have demonstrated that consumers do not understand arbitration clauses. In contrast, no study […]
Mark Edwin Burge of Texas A&M has written After FTX: Can the Original Bitcoin Use Case Be Saved?, 72 Kansas Law Review, (2023). Here is the abstract: Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies spawned by the innovation of blockchain programming have exploded in prominence, both in gains of massive market value and in dramatic market losses, […]
More about the lower court opinion here. Given the Fifth Circuit’s politics, I’m not sure things will fare any better there, but hope is the thing with feathers. Even the Fifth Circuit must reach the correct decision sometimes.
Here. The discussion draws on Professor Budnitz’s article, New Developments in Payment Systems and Services Affecting Low-Income Consumers: Challenges and Opportunities, Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy (2023).
Here. The Steiger Fellowship program is an ABA-funded paid summer internship that places students in AG’s offices around the country to do consumer protection work.