Author Archives: Jeff Sovern

What effects might the $150,000 cap on government student loans for professional schools have?

The so-called Big Beautiful Bill caps an individual’s aggregate government student loans for professional school education at $150,000. For many people, that wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of attending, for example, a law or medical school. A 2021 ABA study that surveyed more than 1300 lawyers who had graduated or been licensed in the […]

Gould and Van Loo paper offers some reasons Congress underproduces consumer protection statutes

Jonathan S. Gould of Berkeley & Rory Van Loo of BU have written Legislating for the Future, 92 U. Chi. L. Rev. 375 (2025). The article is about legislation to prevent financial crises but much of it applies to consumer protection statutes in general. They say, for example: Members of Congress focus on their immediate […]

Weinberger: CFPB Tells Employees to Pack Up Offices as Mass Firings Loom

Here, in Bloomberg Law. Weinberger writes: That Vought is telling CFPB employees to come collect their personal belongings is a sign that he’s confident the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will overturn a lower court ruling that blocked an attempt to fire nearly 1,500 members of the approximately 1,700 people who worked […]

Who will be the next nominee for CFPB director–and does it matter?

In his Bloomberg Law article, Trump’s Eventual CFPB Pick Will Work in White House’s Shadow, Evan Weinberger reports that “Mark Calabria, an Office of Management and Budget official currently detailed to the CFPB and former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and acting Comptroller of the Currency Rodney Hood” are under consideration. But Weinberger also […]

Pat McCoy paper on issues with the Restatement of Consumer Contracts

Patricia A. McCoy of Boston College has written Inflection Points in The Drafting of the Restatement on Consumer Contracts: Salience and Its ARC. Here’s the abstract: When the Reporters of the Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts (RCK or Restatement) undertook that project for the American Law Institute, they faced a bind.  Courts generally infer blanket […]

WaPo: Millions of Americans hit with bad credit [scores] after missed student loan payments

Here, by  Abha Bhattarai. According to the article “Credit scores dipped by more than 100 points for 2.2 million delinquent student loan borrowers, and 150 points or more for more than 1 million in the first three months of 2025, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.” Student loan borrowers […]

Op-ed argues that states should pass laws obliging retailers to disclose how much tariffs add to prices

In the Baltimore Sun (also available on Lexis) titled “Marylanders deserve to know what tariffs are costing them.” The op-ed, which I wrote, specifically addresses Maryland but the arguments apply to other states too. Here are two paragraphs (the essay had previously noted that the White House had attacked Amazon’s consideration of tariff disclosures as […]

What could a hostile federal government do to law schools?

I’m trying to get a handle on just how vulnerable law schools are to an adversarial presidential administration. Here’s my list of potential vulnerabilities so far: Federal grants. Because few, if any, law schools receive substantial federal grants, this lever is not very effective against law schools—directly. But see item 5 below. Foreign Students. Law […]

Consumer suit charges American Arbitration Association with favoring businesses

So Bonnie Eslinger reports in Law360’s American Arbitration Assoc. Accused Of Pro-Corp. Monopoly. The plaintiffs claim violations of state and federal antitrust laws. Here are the first two paragraphs of the complaint: This case is about the predatorial behavior of an arbitration association in its attempt to race to the bottom of the barrel of […]

Eric Halperin NYT op-ed: Trump Is Turning Our Consumer Watchdog Into a Corporate Protector

Here. Finally the NYT runs an op-ed about the CFPB! And it’s a good one. Here are the first two paragraphs: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is turning into the Corporate Financial Protection Bureau. President Trump’s C.F.P.B. has not only ceased to pursue its mandate; it has taken the unprecedented step of unwinding prior victories […]