Since its 2019 decision in Salcedo v. Hanna, which held that a Telephone Consumer Protection Act plaintiff who received only a single unwanted text message lacked standing to sue because he had not suffered an actual injury, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has been out of step with the other federal […]
Author Archives: Scott Nelson
For the second time in the space of two weeks, the Supreme Court issued a narrow, but unanimous, decision against a company seeking arbitration. Today's decision in Southwest Airlines v. Saxon, like the one two weeks ago in Morgan v. Sundance, Inc., involved an employment arbitration agreement, not a consumer agreement. And the specific issue […]
Earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit gave the CFPB a major victory in its long-running fight against a payday lender that had sought to evade state usury limits and licensing laws by originating its loans through an entity owned by a member of a Native American tribe using agreements […]
After many months and multiple rounds of supplemental briefing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Seila Law v. CFPB (2020) and Collins v. Yellen (2021), the en banc Fifth Circuit in CFPB v. All American Check Cashing finally decided—well, nothing. According to the 3-page, unsigned per curiam opinion issued by the court, […]
This morning the Supreme Court released its decision in TransUnion v. Ramirez. The decision reveals that although Justice Thomas has jumped off the bandwagon, the Court's majority is continuing its project of expanding its Article III standing doctrine as an obstacle to suits in federal court. This time, the Court holds explicitly that even when […]
As noted in Jeff Sovern’s post last week, the Supreme Court ruled last Thursday in the case of Facebook v. Duguid that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) does not apply to robocalls and robotexts sent to cell phones unless they are sent from equipment that uses a random or sequential number generator. The decision […]
In a string of rulings over the past decade, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it more difficult to sue corporations that operate nationwide unless suit is brought in the states where they are incorporated or have their principal places of business. But in its March 25, 2021 ruling in Ford Motor Company v. Montana […]
Steve Gardner has given a great and succinct summary of todays decision in Barr v. AAPC. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act lives, minus its obnoxious exception for government debt collection robocalls. What's not to like about that bottom line? I want to make an additional point about the significance of the decision. For the second […]
The Supreme Court issued its ruling in Seila Law v. CFPB today, holding by a 5-4 vote that the Congress violated the principle of separation of powers by placing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under a single director removable by the president only for cause. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, with Justice Kagan […]
It's no secret that many companies use arbitration agreements with class-action bans not because they want to arbitrate claims, but because they want to avoid claims altogether. When large numbers of consumers or employees share a claim and can't bring a class action, defendants can usually expect that few if any will come forward and […]