Stephen Raher has written The Company Store and the Literally Captive Market: Consumer Law in Prisons and Jails, 17 Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal 3 (2019). Here's the abstract: The growth of public expense associated with mass incarceration has led many carceral systems to push certain costs onto the people who are under correctional […]
Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship
Jessica LaVoice and Domonkos F. Vamossy, both of the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Economics, have written Racial Disparities in Debt Collection. Here is the abstract: A distinct set of disadvantages experienced by black Americans increases their likelihood of experiencing negative financial shocks, decreases their ability to mitigate the impact of such shocks, and ultimately […]
Richard Frankel of Drexel has written Corporate Hostility to Arbitration, 50 Seton Hall Law Review (forthcoming 2020). Here is the abstract: In the last 30 years, corporations have aggressively and successfully pushed the Supreme Court to invalidate virtually all state regulation of mandatory arbitration clauses on the ground that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) preempts any […]
That's the subject of a new book by Linda Fisher of Seton Hall and Judith L. Fox of Notre Dame, published by Cambridge Press, The Foreclosure Echo: How the Hardest Hit Have Been Left Out of the Economic Recovery. You can read the introduction here. Here's the abstract: This paper includes the Table of Contents and […]
James P. Nehf of Indiana–Indianapolis has written The Failure of 'Notice and Consent' as Effective Consumer Policy. Here's the abstract: Over the past several decades, the preferred model for consumer protection in most countries has emphasized a notice and consent (or choice) approach with less emphasis on normative laws that prohibit or mandate certain contract terms, […]
We have received the following call for abstracts (last year's conference was excellent): The Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, its director Ted Mermin, and co-organizers Abbye Atkinson, Kathleen Engel, Manisha Padi, Rory Van Loo, and Lauren Willis are pleased to announce the second annual Consumer Law Scholars Conference (CLSC), which will be […]
Jamie Luguri and Lior Strahilevitz, both of Chicago, have written Shining a Light on Dark Patterns. Here is the abstract: Dark patterns are user interfaces whose designers knowingly confuse users, make it difficult for users to express their actual preferences, or manipulate users into taking certain actions. They typically exploit cognitive biases and prompt online consumers […]
Daniel Schwarcz of Minnesota has written Towards a Civil Rights Approach to Insurance Anti-Discrimination Law, 69 DePaul Law Review (Forthcoming). Here's the abstract: Discrimination is fundamental to the business of auto and homeowners insurance. Yet state insurance law does remarkably little to police against the risk that this discrimination will unfairly harm minority or low-income […]
That's the topic of Commissioning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by law prof Jolina Cuaresma. Here's the abstract: There has been much debate over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s lack of executive and congressional oversight: its single director removable only for cause and its operations are not subject to appropriations. This paper explains how this […]
Matthew A. Bruckner of Howard has written Preventing Predation & Encouraging Innovation in Fintech Lending. Here is the abstract: More than 20 years ago, IBM's Deep Blue vanquished chess grandmaster and reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a pair of best-of-six matches. Since then, numerous companies have invested large sums of money to develop additional […]