Teaching Consumer Law Conference – Santa Fe, New Mexico, 18 & 19 May 2018 The Center for Consumer Law at the University of Houston Law Center, in cooperation with the University of New Mexico School of Law, is organizing its tenth biennial international teaching consumer law conference. The subject is “Teaching Consumer Law: Where Have […]
Author Archives: Richard Alderman
Worried you may be affected by Equifax's massive data breach? The credit bureau has set up a site, equifaxsecurity2017.com, that allows you to check whether your personal information was exposed and sign up for credit monitoring. But regulators and lawyers are becoming concerned that the site could pose risks to consumers. As a result, you […]
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear three cases related to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision in D.R. Horton in which the NLRB held that companies that require employees to sign class action waivers violate their rights to act collectively under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The three cases to be […]
In Mashiri v. Epstein Grinnell & Howell, the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s dismissal for failure to state a cause of action under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). On appeal, Defendants argued for the first time they were merely enforcing a security interest and subject to only §1692f(6). The court rejected Defendants’ […]
The IRS has finalized a proposed rule issued in 2014 removing the three-year nonpayment testing period from the list of “events” for determining when debt had been discharged for purposes of issuing a Form 1099-C, Cancellation of Debt, to taxpayers. Prior to the change in the rule, individuals would receive a 1099-C after three years, […]
The Uniform Law Commission has proposed its "Wage Garnishment Act." The Commission notes: Currently, every state has a different wage garnishment law and process. This means that employers who do business across multiple states must know and abide by a different, and often complex, law for each jurisdiction. If employers make processing errors calculating garnishments, […]
The Third Circuit recently held that title insurers did not waive their ability to compel individual arbitration when attempting to do so earlier would have been futile under then-existing law. In Chassen, et al. v. Fidelity National Financial, Inc., et al., (Sept. 8, 2016), plaintiffs sought to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in claimed […]
The Department of Health and Human Services final rule overhauling skilled nursing facility prohibits all arbitration agreements at the time of admission. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, such pre-dispute agreements are "fundamentally unfair" because "it is almost impossible for residents or their decision-makers to give fully informed and voluntary consent to […]
The Restoring Statutory Rights Act of 2016, sponsored by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, was sent to congressional committee on February 4, 2016 for consideration. The proposed legislation declares that the FAA “did not, and should not have been interpreted to, supplant or nullify the legislatively created rights and remedies which Congress . . . has […]
In a recent post, Jeff Sovern noted that, “About two-thirds of US law schools offer neither a doctrinal course nor a clinic on consumer law, despite the significance of the subject.” In many cases, this is because there are fewer law professors interested in teaching consumer, rather than a conscious effort on the part of […]