So reports George Simons at Bloomberg Law. Excerpt: California, Arizona, and Minnesota are good examples of states attempting to increase access to justice while charging defendants enormous filing fees. These fees are charged for all types of civil lawsuits, but are particularly relevant to debt lawsuits where defendants are being sued because, presumably, they don’t […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
The LA Times and Ralph Nader have already written about it. Here's the press release, which includes links: Hacked by Big Corporations, America’s Civil Justice System Has Crashed, Consumer Advocates Say Report Details Impact on Consumers – and Democracy – of Corporate Attack on the Rule of Law, Proposes New Protections and Legal Procedures Contact: Harvey […]
David Horton of California, Davis has written Forced Remote Arbitration, 108 Cornell Law Review (2022). Here’s the abstract: Courts responded to COVID-19 by going remote. In early 2020, as lockdown orders swept through the country, virtual hearings—which once were rare—became common. This shift generated fierce debate about how video trials differ from in-person proceedings. Now, […]
Here. Excerpt: After years of struggling to make payments that hardly put a dent in the loans she took out to attend a now defunct arts school, Victoria Linssen saw a glimmer of hope. A deal last month between 39 states and Navient, a student lending giant accused of unfairly ensnaring borrowers like her, would […]
The effort was led by Berkeley's Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice and resulted in production of a series of short memoranda available here. Topics covered include discrimination, arbitration, income share agreements, BNPL, substitution effects of regulation, disclosures, overdraft protections, and more.
Junyuan Ke and Weiguang Wang, both of the University of Rochester – Simon Business School and Natasha Zhang Foutz, Associate Professor of Commerce at the University of Virginia, have written Heterogeneous Consumer Response and Mitigation toward Healthcare Data Breach: Insights from Location Big Data. Here is the abstract: Data breaches pose grave dangers to consumers, […]
Mark Huelsman of the Student Borrower Protection Center has written Driving Runaway Debt: How IDR’s Current Design Buries Borrowers Under Billions of Dollars in Unaffordable Interest. Here's the abstract: This report highlights how the design of the main protection meant to deliver affordability to federal student loan borrowers, Income-Driven Repayment (IDR), ignores the widespread effects that […]
Anita L. Allen of Penn has written Dismantling the Black Opticon: Race Equity and Online Privacy and Data Protection Reform, forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. Here’s the abstract: In the opening decades of the 21st century popular online platforms rapidly transformed the world. These platforms have come with benefits, but a heavy price to […]
by Jeff Sovern Over at the ContractsProf Blog. The bill would provide a short form and a diagram for Terms of Service. But without consumer testing, who knows if consumers would pay attention even to the short form or diagram.

