by Paul Bland, Senior Attorney, Public Justice, Of Counsel, Chavez & Gertler On Twitter @PblandBland In Kennedy v. Wells Fargo, Judge King of the Southern District of Florida enforced another arbitration clause that tosses out consumer claims in the multi district litigation involving checking overdraft claims. The plaintiffs had several arguments that the particular arbitration clause at […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
I'm presenting at a few CLE programs over the next few days and I thought readers of the blog might be interested. The first can be accessed via phone; the other two will be at the American Association of Justice's Annual Convention in San Francisco: A one-hour phone briefing on American Express v. Italian Colors: Practical Implications […]
Here. The story is about how car makers are using arbitration clauses to defeat consumer protections, including state lemon laws, and keep defects secret.
In February, the brokerage firm Charles Schwab won a ruling from a hearing panel of FINRA, the financial industry regulatory authority, invalidating FINRA's rule against class-action bans and allowing Schwab to use a class-action ban in its customer agreements. The panel concluded that "the amended language used in Schwab's customer agreements to prohibit participation in […]
Today the Supreme Court ruled in Comcast Corp. v. Behrens that an antitrust class action was improperly certified because Justice Scalia and four other Justices found the plaintiffs' damage theory inadequately supported by expert testimony. Others will no doubt have more to say on this, but I found the majority opinion transparently result-oriented, and disturbing […]
Richard D. Freer of Emory has written The Supreme Court and the Class Action: Where We Are and Where We Might Be Going. Here's the abstract: In 2010 and 2011, the Supreme Court decided five class action cases. In 2012, it has agreed to hear four more. This piece summarizes what the Court has done […]
Shay Lavie of Harvard has written The Malleability of Collective Litigation, forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review. Here is the abstract: In Wal-Mart v. Dukes (131 S.Ct. 2541 [2011]), Wal-Mart avoided class action because employment decisions were made by local supervisors. However, it was Wal-Mart who chose to delegate discretion; by doing so, it […]
by Greg Beck The Ninth Circuit today upheld a district court’s decision approving a class-action settlement against Facebook over the company’s long-defunct “Beacon” program—one of the first of what turned out to be a long string of privacy fiascos for the social media company. With Beacon, Facebook teamed up with Blockbuster to post users’ video […]
Myriam E. Gilles of Cardozo has written Killing Them with Kindness: ‘Consumer-Friendly’ Arbitration Clauses after AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, forthcoming in Notre Dame Law Review. Herer’s the abstract: In AT&T v. Concepcion, the Supreme Court struck California’s so-called “Discover Bank rule” – a judge-made rule providing that arbitration agreements attended by class action waivers are […]