This pro-environment proposal seems to be attracting support across the political spectrum. Read a prominent conservative's argument for it here. He's got a lot of arguments that don't concern the environment, and he notes that "even for global warming skeptics, there’s no reason not to welcome a benign measure that induces prudential reductions in CO2 […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
In a victory for workers, last week the California Supreme Court held that when a security guard is required to be at his or her worksite on call, the worker is entitled to be compensated, no matter what percent of the time on call is spent actually responding to disturbances. As discussed in this L.A. […]
This must-read New York Times article tells the powerful cautionary tale of what happens when damage caps depress lawyers' incentives to take meritorious product-defect cases: life-threatening dangers persist, with deadly results. The public might have learned of the G.M. ignition-switch problem through litigation as early as 2007, but given caps on damages, the economics of […]
The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs announced this week that it has reached a settlement with collection company National Credit Adjusters (NCA) over collections on illegal payday loans. The Kansas-based company will pay approximately $1 million in restitution and the Department estimates over 4,600 New Yorkers will be eligible for compensation. NCA will […]
With the news that ESPN will become available through a streaming service, it looks like the cable market will be in for a shakeup, including potentially one that forces cable providers to "unbundle" their channel packages and enable consumers to pay only for the channels they want. This sounds like a good thing, right? Not […]
That is the question raised by the incoming Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to FBI assertions that the agency is entitled to use a device masquerading as a cell-phone tower to intercept your calls and texts in public. The Daily Dot explains the troubling technology at issue: The Stingray […]
…is the title of this NPR piece, which examines both how easy it is to lose one's license because of poverty (in Wisconsin, for instance, failure to pay a ticket can result in a two-year suspension, which is harsher than the penalty for either drunk driving or a hit-and-run), and how losing a driver's license […]
A couple of significant pro-consumer, pro-privacy rulings over the last two weeks of 2014: First, a federal district court in Minnesota rejected the argument that putative class of Target consumers harmed by the retail giant's data breach lacked standing to sue over the breach. As Law360 reports, the court "concluded that the plaintiffs' assertions that […]
Let's kick off the new year with some good news on the CFPB enforcement front: We've been following for a few months now the story of Virginia retail chains that take advantage of servicemembers' transience to trap them in a cycle of debt. (See here for my original discussion and here for a discussion of […]
Today, Public Citizen filed the opening brief in Pele v. Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, a Fourth Circuit appeal testing whether and in what circumstances state-affiliated loan entities can qualify as "arms of the state" and so partake of a state's sovereign immunity from suit. The appeal arises out of the case of Lee Pele, […]