Shmuel I. Becher of Victoria University of Wellington, Yuval Feldman of Bar-Ilan University and Orly Lobel of San Diego have written Poor Consumer(s) Law: The Case of High-Cost Credit and Payday Loans in Legal Applications of Marketing Theory, Jacob Gersen & Joel Steckel, eds., Cambridge University Press (2019, Forthcoming). Here's the abstract: Consumers in general, and […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
by Jeff Sovern NPR has a report, including Seth Frotman's resignation letter, here. The letter deserves to be read.
Gerrit De Geest of Washington University in St. Louis has written Rents: How Marketing Causes Inequality. Chapter One is available here. Here is the abstract: This working paper contains the introduction and first chapter of a forthcoming book on the relationship between marketing and inequality. I argue that the dramatic rise of income inequality since 1970 […]
by Jeff Sovern This isn't consumer law, strictly speaking, but I thought readers of the blog might be interested to know that the Trump administration's Treasury Department thinks banking is not a financial service. That interpretation has the effect of cutting taxes paid by banks. David Sirota has the story, The Trump Administration Just Found a […]
Tamara R. Piety of Tulsa has written Advertising as Experimentation on Human Subjects. Here's the abstract: Within the industry, it is an article of faith that consumers distrust advertising. One reason for that distrust may be that they fear being manipulated. Yet the debate about advertising and manipulation always seems to revolve around how much manipulation […]
by Jeff Sovern That's the question David Dayen raises in an important essay in InTheseTimes, Trump Appointees Are Pushing a Deregulation Plan That Could Dramatically Erode Consumer Protections. As Dayen points out, in the run-up to the Great Recession, the OCC proclaimed that state anti-predatory lending laws were preempted as to national banks. We know […]
Rory Van Loo of BU has written Technology Regulation by Default: Platforms, Privacy, and the CFPB. Here's the abstract: In the absence of a technology-focused regulator, diverse administrative agencies have been forced to develop regulatory models for governing their sphere of the data economy. These largely uncoordinated efforts offer a laboratory of regulatory experimentation on governance architecture. […]
by Jeff Sovern Here is a report by Kate Berry in the American Banker (behind paywall). A vote for her would be a vote for someone without experience in or any demonstrated knowledge of consumer law and for someone who professes to value transparency but who was not transparent during her confirmation hearings. UPDATE: Evan Weinberger […]
by Jeff Sovern David Dayen has coined the phrase, the "Mulvaney Discount," to describe the tendency of CFPB Acting Director Mick Mulvaney to settle cases for less than the original amount. As Dayen and others have pointed out, Mulvaney's CFPB has been announcing more enforcement cases than it did in his first six months. That's […]
by Jeff Sovern We just posted to SSRN the draft of our article, Validation and Verification Vignettes: More Results from an Empirical Study of Consumer Understanding of Debt Collection Validation Notices, Forthcoming in the Rutgers U. L. Rev. (with Kate Walton & Nathan Frishberg). Comments welcome! Here's the abstract: The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act obliges debt […]