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 […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
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 […]
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act provides for federal district court jurisdiction in cases alleging violations of that statute except where (1) any one claim is less than $25, (2) the total amount in controversy is less than $50,000, or (3) it is a class action with less than 100 named plaintiffs. Several MMWA defendants have removed […]
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 […]
The latest episode of Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Finance Monitor Podcast explores mass arbitration and includes as a guest arbitration champion Andrew Pincus, who argued the industry’s–and winning–position in Concepcion. As I listened to the podcast, which I recommend to those interested in consumer law, it became clear that one of Mr. Pincus’s chief complaints about […]
The D.C. Circuit today issued an opinion granting a Rule 23(f) petition and vacating a district court’s denial of class certification on the grounds that the class definition created an impermissible “fail-safe” class– i.e., a class whose membership can only be ascertained through a determination of the merits of the case. The plaintiffs, former employee […]
Almost twenty years ago, various groups of merchants filed antitrust litigation against Visa, Mastercard, and banks that serve as payment-card issuers for those networks, tied to the “interchange fees” charged for each transaction. (In full disclosure, I worked on one of the district court cases over a decade ago. I remember close-to-nothing about the case.) […]
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 […]
Many of us learned about multlievel-marketing company and purveyor of women’s clothing LuLaRoe in 2021, when dueling documentaries about the company’s rapid growth and decline were released. As featured in those documentaries, the company was the subject of extensive litigation and investigations as to its relationships with its “fashion retailers” — i.e., those recruited to […]