So reports PHILIP MARCELO of the Associated Press here. This isn’t the first time a company has changed course in an arbitration demand after adverse publicity. Wells Fargo had actually won a motion to send a case to arbitration arising out of its unauthorized account scandal back in 2016, before settling its class action for […]
Category Archives: Arbitration
USA Today has the story here. I wonder if Disney will back off after its public relations black eye.
In 2018, a consumer brought a putative FDCPA class action based on a letter naming the collection arm of her credit card company, rather than the credit card company itself, as the “current/original creditor.” A federal district court granted the defendant’s motion to compel arbitration, and the parties arbitrated the dispute. After 4 years of […]
Generally, when you read an opinion holding that there was insufficient evidence of an arbitration agreement between a consumer and a corporation, it’s a win for the plaintiff. But in Wallrich v. Samsung Electronics America, decided by the Seventh Circuit yesterday, the opposite was true. Paula Wallrich and several thousand other consumers had filed arbitration […]
Will consumer protection come up during the debate? My guess is not. It seems unlikely that a moderator or President Trump would raise it. I could see President Biden bringing up junk fees, as he has called for their regulation, in response to a question, though I am not expecting it. The headline issues have […]
From today’s decision in Coinbase, Inc. v. Suski. Longtime readers will recall the empirical evidence that consumers do not understand arbitration clauses and so, in my view, they have not “actually agreed” to arbitration clauses.
Tamar Meshel and Moin A. Yahya both of the University of Alberta – Faculty of Law, have written The Gatekeepers of the Federal Arbitration Act: An Empirical Analysis of the FAA in the Lower Courts, forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Journal. Here’s the abstract: This article presents the results of the first comprehensive empirical study of motions […]
Benjamin C. Zipursky of Fordham and Zahra Takhshid of Denver and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have written Consumer Protection and the Illusory Promise of the Unconscionability Defense, forthcoming in 103 Texas Law Review. Here’s the abstract: The United States Supreme Court’s notorious decision in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion seems to display impatience with the idea of […]
Samuel Becher of the Victoria University of Wellington and Tal Zarsky of the University of Haifa have written Big Mistake(s), forthcoming in the Florida Law Review. Here’s the abstract: The digital age has brought the imbalance of power between prominent firms and individual consumers to the forefront. Despite their proclamations of upholding democratic values and […]
Andrea J. Boyack of Missouri has written Abuse of Contract: Boilerplate Erasure of Consumer Counterparty Rights, Iowa Law Review, Forthcoming. Here’s the abstract: Contract law and the new Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts generally treats the entirety of the company’s boilerplate as presumptively binding. Entrusting the content of consumer contracts to companies creates a […]