Daniel Wilf-Townsend of Chicago has written Assembly-Line Plaintiffs, Forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review. Here is the abstract: Around the country, state courts are being flooded with the claims of massive repeat filers. These large corporate plaintiffs leverage economies of scale to bring tremendous quantities of low-value claims against largely unrepresented individual defendants. Using recently developed […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Jim Hawkins of Houston and Tiffany Penner have written Advertising Injustices: Marketing Race and Credit in America, 70 Emory Law Journal 1619 (2021). Here is the abstract: Access to affordable credit played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement. But today, racial and ethnic minorities oversubscribe to high-cost lending products like payday loans and underuse […]
James E. McNulty a finance professor at Florida Atlantic University has written Consumer Protection Settlements: Theory and Policy. Here's the abstract: Lawsuits have a deterrent effect, but this is mitigated if settlements are routine. Regulators and judges should consider that a firm contemplating predatory activity directed at financially unsophisticated individuals might have built an estimate of […]
Here. As usual, he reports the facts in an engaging way.
Here. Given the FTC's role as the leading federal agency on privacy issues, there is value in having a privacy advocate on the Commission. If confirmed, Bedoya would get Rohit Chopra's seat, assuming Chopra is in turn confirmed to lead the CFPB.
Here, by Emmanuel Martinez and Lauren Kirchner and headlined "The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms." Excerpt: An investigation by The Markup has found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to White people with similar financial characteristics—even when we controlled for newly available financial factors that the […]
Samuel Becher of Victoria University of Wellington and Uri Benoliel of Ramat Gan Law School have written Dark Contracts. Here is the abstract: Millions of consumers are routinely subject to non-transparent consumer contracts. Such contracts undermine fundamental contract law notions. They leave consumers uninformed and disempowered. They also encourage unethical behavior and undercut the ability of […]
Charlotte Tschider of Loyola of Chicago has written Meaningful Choice: A History of Consent and Alternatives to the Consent Myth, 22 N.C. J.L. & Tech. 617 (2021). Here is the abstract: Although the first legal conceptions of commercial privacy were identified in Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s foundational 1890 article, The Right to Privacy, conceptually, […]
Adam S. Zimmerman of Loyola of Los Angeles has written The Class Appeal, 89 University of Chicago Law Review (Forthcoming 2022). Here's the abstract: For a wide variety of claims against the government, the federal courthouse doors are closed to all but those brought by powerful, organized interests. This is because hundreds of laws—colloquially known […]
Here, by Amelia Pollard. Excerpt: Conservative pro-business groups have hit upon a new tactic to protect its members’ interests: outright purchasing of grassroots support. Late last week, David Chami, an Arizona attorney who specializes in consumer protection, received an email from Drew Johnson, who identified himself as working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Johnson […]