Bloomberg Law’s Evan Weinberger has the story here (may be behind paywall), including a link to the petition. Weinberger later posted on what used to be called Twitter the CFPB’s response to his request for comment. The petition relies heavily on Roseanna Sommers’ study, which we discussed here.
Category Archives: Arbitration
An Uber driver agrees to Uber’s standard form contract, which includes an arbitration clause. The arbitration clause permits drivers to opt out within 30 days, and the driver does so. So the driver can never be forced into arbitration with Uber, right? Wrong. Greg Gauthier recently pointed me to a case from the Eastern District […]
Tim Samples of the University of Georgia – Terry College of Business, Katherine Ireland of the University of Georgia Libraries, and Caroline Kraczon, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have written TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2023). Here’s an excerpt from the article about […]
This week, I received three different emails informing me that companies I interact with had updated their terms and conditions. The ordinary consumer likely deleted these emails, or read them without understanding what they were talking about, but I knew right away that the biggest change was likely about arbitration. And I was right. All […]
Maria Glover of Georgetown has written Recent Developments in Mandatory Arbitration Warfare: Winners and Losers (So Far) in Mass Arbitration, 100 Washington University Law Review (2023). Here’s the abstract: Mass arbitration has sent shock waves through the civil justice system and unnerved the defense bar. To see how quickly and dramatically this phenomenon has entered […]
On Wednesday, I blogged about Roseanna Sommers’ important new arbitration study. One point I want to highlight about the study is that it makes clear that consumers don’t understand arbitration opt-outs at all. First, some background: some companies insert in their arbitration clauses a provision that allows consumers to opt out of arbitration if they […]
Roseanna Sommers of Michigan has written an important new paper, What do consumers understand about predispute arbitration agreements? An empirical investigation. Here’s the abstract: The results of a survey of 1,071 adults in the United States reveal that most consumers do not pay attention to, let alone understand, arbitration clauses in their everyday lives. The vast […]
Farshad Ghodoosi of California State, Northridge, David Nazarian College of Business & Economics, Department of Business Law and Monica M. Sharif of California State, Los Angeles have written Arbitration Effect, 60 Am. Bus. L.J. 235 (2023) (behind paywall but also available on Westlaw). Here’s the abstract: Arbitration is changing the United States justice system. Critics argue […]
On June 2, I wrote a blog post, Opaque (formerly Dark) Patterns and Arbitration Opt Outs, arguing that arbitration opt outs are really opaque patterns. On June 8, Mark J. Levin of the Ballard Spahr firm replied in a post at the Consumer Financial Monitor Blog, Arbitration opt out provisions benefit consumers, Professor Sovern. But Mr. […]
Dark Patterns (I prefer calling them Opaque Patterns) have been drawing a lot of attention from consumer protection regulators in recent years. For those who are unclear on what they are, the FTC has defined them as “practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may […]