Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship

Richard Frankel Empirical Study of How Businesses Responded to Mass Arbitration

Richard Frankel of Drexel has written Fighting Mass Arbitration: An Empirical Study of the Corporate Response to Mass Arbitration and Its Implications for the Federal Arbitration Act. Here’s the abstract: Over the last forty years, corporations have increasingly inserted mandatory arbitration provisions into their consumer and employment contracts. Most prominently, and with the Supreme Court’s blessing, […]

Consumer Debt Litigation Index and Report

The National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham Law School has posted a report and online resource that ranks the 50 states and the District of Columbia on their adoption of policies promoting fairness in consumer debt litigation. The report notes that debt-collection lawsuits inundate courts across the country. Because many suits go unanswered, […]

Andrea Chandrasekhar paper finds chain stores in Black neighborhoods offer lower-quality consumer experience than in White neighborhoods

Andrea Chandrasekher of UC-Davis has a history of writing important papers on important subjects. She has done so again, with The “Good” Starbucks: Consumer Redlining in Large American Chain Stores. Here’s the abstract: Racial discrimination in the retail realm has been well-documented in the academic literature. However, past studies have focused on retail redlining, a discriminatory […]

Fairness of online retail platforms’ recommendations

Last fall, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint alleging that Amazon Marketplace unfairly highlights its own products on its website to encourage consumers to select the Amazon brand over competitors’ products. The Regulatory Review reports today on a study that questions that conclusion. The study’s authors explain how evaluating the fairness of product placement […]

Paige Skiba and Carlie Malone paper compares the effects of installment loans and payday loans

Carlie Malone and Paige Marta Skiba, both of Vanderbilt, have written Installment Loans. Here’s the abstract: Installment loans have increasingly replaced traditional payday loans in the short-term, small-dollar credit market. Installment loans, often offered by the same lenders who provide payday loans, have larger principal amounts, longer repayment periods, and lower interest rates relative to payday […]

Floyd article on virtual RTO agreements

Carrie Floyd of Michigan has written New Tech, Old Problem: The Rise of Virtual Rent-to-Own Agreements, forthcoming at 65 Boston College Law Review 3 (2024). Here is the abstract: This Article explores how fintech has disrupted the traditional rent-to-own (RTO) industry, giving rise to new, virtual RTO agreements (VirTOs). These VirTOs have enabled the RTO […]

David Berman payday lending article

David Berman has written Lending Experimentalism: A New Regulatory Approach to Payday Loans, Forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law Policy, Here is the abstract: Payday loans entangle consumers with few alternatives in catastrophically harmful cycles of borrowing. But because of their design, payday loans are vexingly difficult to regulate effectively. This article explains how […]

Spitko Article: Arbitration Secrecy

E. Gary Spitko of Santa Clara has written Arbitration Secrecy, 108 Cornell Law Review 1729 (2023). Here’s the abstract: Parties to an arbitration contract may agree to a secrecy clause that will govern their arbitration process to protect the confidentiality of their proprietary or personal information. Of great concern, however, they also may use such an […]

Mark Budnitz’s brief essay on problems in modern consumer payments

Here, in the Los Angeles Lawyer (you might have to scroll to page 28). Among the topics discussed are FedNow and cryptocurrencey. Excerpt: Ominously, the introduction of consumer-facing chat-bots and other artificial intelligence devices has provided fraudsters with new and improved tools for deceiving consumers. At the same time, consumer transactions now routinely involve “click […]