We told you in May that Public Citizen was representing Prof. Rebecca Tushnet of Georgetown Law in seeking to intervene and unseal court documents in a trademark dispute between Amazon.com and the maker of a dietary supplement called SeroVital. The district court denied summary judgment to Amazon this past spring, but key facts on which the […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
…is the subject of a recent article from FiveThirtyEight, which explains how the middle class has shrunk over the past 45 years and where those formerly in the middle class have gone (economically speaking). And where have they gone? More Americans are now either at the extremes of wealth or poverty than in the middle (defined as […]
The New York Times explains, with maps.
The controversial Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO was arrested today for wire and securities fraud. The New York Times explains succinctly why Skhreli has become symbolic of what's wrong in the industry: Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies […]
A series of pieces in a SCOTUSBlog symposium consider various aspects of the pending religious challenge to Obamacare's conception mandate, which we've previously covered here and here. Later this term, the Supreme Court will hear seven cases on this subject known together by the name of the lead case, Zubik v. Burwell. The question is whether the Affordable […]
The Washington Post explains how an employee who works in Maryland asserting rights under Maryland law in a Maryland court might be out of luck: his contract with his employer says that Georgia law applies. It's getting easier for companies to stick choice of law provisions into contractual fine print and thereby pick the state […]
In a report released last week, Public Citizen documents how the Chamber is trying to thwart the work of the CFPB in areas such as credit card regulation and protecting service members from predatory lending. Read the report, "Undermining the CFPB," here.
By unanimous consent, the Senate yesterday passed a law to ban non-disparagement clauses in consumer contracts. Public Citizen supports the Consumer Review Freedom Act, which addresses a problem we've litigated and advocated against on many occasions, including most notably in the KlearGear case. Here's a discussion of the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the bill […]
Over the past few years, we've seen sweeping arbitration decisions from the Court like Concepcion and Italian Colors making it much harder for plaintiffs to avoid forced arbitration and get their day in court. By contrast, this week's arbitration case (a loss for the consumer, as is typical) is of far less consequence. DirecTV v. Imburgia was about […]
The New York Times and Washington Post both discuss how a little-noticed provision in a federal spending bill last year is creating problems for the implementation of the ACA. (According to the Times, it has "has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s […]