Health advocates have been saying for years that consumers shouldn’t use antibacterial soaps. Yet manufacturers have continued to put antibacterial agents into liquid soaps, to the extent that for a while it was hard to find products on store shelves that didn’t contain them. Now the Food & Drug Administration has finally gotten the message. […]
Author Archives: Scott Nelson
I have to admit that there are a lot of things I love about Amazon.com. That it tries to require its customers to arbitrate their claims and waive the right to participate in class actions is not one of them. In an opinion issued today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that […]
Banks want to keep their customers out of court. But consumers overwhelmingly want the right to take banks to court if they have a dispute. Those are the findings of research released today by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew studied two subjects: (1) the use of arbitration clauses, class-action bans, and jury trial waivers by […]
The Supreme Court today issued its much-anticipated ruling in Spokeo v. Robins. The opinion vacates and remands the Ninth Circuit's holding that the plaintiff had standing to pursue his claims under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, but leaves open the possibility that the court of appeals may reach the same result on remand. The majority, consisting […]
Another important regulatory document related to the CFPB's proposed rule is the Final Report of the Small Business Review Panel on the CFPB’s Potential Rulemaking on Pre-Dispute Arbitration Agreements. In creating the CFPB, Congress subjected its regulations to the requirements of SBREFA, the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act, a piece of legislation originally enacted […]
In a much-anticipated ruling, the Supreme Court today held that a class-action defendant cannot moot a plaintiff’s case by making a pre-class-certification offer of judgment that would satisfy the individual plaintiff’s personal claims but not those of the class. The decision in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, holds that such an offer does not moot the […]
Today's LA Times has another story on the Fiat-Chrysler stratagem of offering customers a "friends and family" discount in return for which consumers sign away their right to sue the automaker by agreeing to arbitration. (We had a short blog entry on the subject last week.) The story points out that most consumers can get […]
Guest post by Julie Murray (Public Citizen Litigation Group) Some states have recently adopted, and dozens of others have considered, laws that require food manufacturers to disclose whether their products have been made through genetic engineering (GE). These laws would at least give consumers useful information to guide their purchasing decisions amid the federal delay […]
In a split decision Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down a portion of an SEC rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose whether their products “have not been found to be ‘DRC conflict free’”—a term defined to mean that they do not […]
A few weeks back I blogged here about pharmaceutical manufacturer Amarin’s lawsuit aiming to allow it to market a fish-oil based drug for a use not approved by the FDA. The FDA denied approval because it concluded the drug had no demonstrated therapeutic benefits for that use, but Amarin claims a First Amendment right to […]