Victoria Barnes of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory has written Anne Fleming’s History of Law and Consumer Finance, 22 Enterprise & Society 316 (2021). Here's the abstract: This article has teased out Anne Flemings’s interests and the overarching themes in her research. It shows how these themes and interests influenced […]
Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship
Daniel Wilf-Townsend of Chicago has written Assembly-Line Plaintiffs, Forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review. Here is the abstract: Around the country, state courts are being flooded with the claims of massive repeat filers. These large corporate plaintiffs leverage economies of scale to bring tremendous quantities of low-value claims against largely unrepresented individual defendants. Using recently developed […]
Jim Hawkins of Houston and Tiffany Penner have written Advertising Injustices: Marketing Race and Credit in America, 70 Emory Law Journal 1619 (2021). Here is the abstract: Access to affordable credit played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement. But today, racial and ethnic minorities oversubscribe to high-cost lending products like payday loans and underuse […]
James E. McNulty a finance professor at Florida Atlantic University has written Consumer Protection Settlements: Theory and Policy. Here's the abstract: Lawsuits have a deterrent effect, but this is mitigated if settlements are routine. Regulators and judges should consider that a firm contemplating predatory activity directed at financially unsophisticated individuals might have built an estimate of […]
Samuel Becher of Victoria University of Wellington and Uri Benoliel of Ramat Gan Law School have written Dark Contracts. Here is the abstract: Millions of consumers are routinely subject to non-transparent consumer contracts. Such contracts undermine fundamental contract law notions. They leave consumers uninformed and disempowered. They also encourage unethical behavior and undercut the ability of […]
Charlotte Tschider of Loyola of Chicago has written Meaningful Choice: A History of Consent and Alternatives to the Consent Myth, 22 N.C. J.L. & Tech. 617 (2021). Here is the abstract: Although the first legal conceptions of commercial privacy were identified in Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s foundational 1890 article, The Right to Privacy, conceptually, […]
Adam S. Zimmerman of Loyola of Los Angeles has written The Class Appeal, 89 University of Chicago Law Review (Forthcoming 2022). Here's the abstract: For a wide variety of claims against the government, the federal courthouse doors are closed to all but those brought by powerful, organized interests. This is because hundreds of laws—colloquially known […]
by Jeff Sovern I have started submitting my article, Six Scandals: Why We Need Consumer Protection Laws Instead of Just Markets, to law reviews and in hopes of winning the law review lottery, decided to try my luck at the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal (as if, as my students said about twenty […]
Vijay Raghavan of Brooklyn has written Consumer Law's Equity Gap, Utah Law Review (forthcoming 2022). Here is the abstract: This article is about the views that shape and constrain the development of consumer law. Consider the market for short-term, high-cost loans. Policymakers tend to justify intervening in these markets on inefficiency grounds (consumers exhibit present bias) […]
by Jeff Sovern I have revised my article, Six Scandals: Why We Need Consumer Protection Laws Instead of Just Markets, to take into account the many helpful comments I received at the Berkeley Consumer Law Scholars Conference. Here is the updated abstract: Markets are powerful mechanisms for serving consumers. Some critics of regulation have suggested […]