We have received the following call for papers appearing below. This one looks especially exciting for consumer law scholars: it's at an elite law school and has an impressive roster of organizers. The Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, its director Ted Mermin, and co-organizers Abbye Atkinson, Kathleen Engel, Rory Van Loo, and […]
Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship
Shmuel I. Becher of Victoria University of Wellington, Yuval Feldman of Bar-Ilan University and Orly Lobel of San Diego have written Poor Consumer(s) Law: The Case of High-Cost Credit and Payday Loans in Legal Applications of Marketing Theory, Jacob Gersen & Joel Steckel, eds., Cambridge University Press (2019, Forthcoming). Here's the abstract: Consumers in general, and […]
Gerrit De Geest of Washington University in St. Louis has written Rents: How Marketing Causes Inequality. Chapter One is available here. Here is the abstract: This working paper contains the introduction and first chapter of a forthcoming book on the relationship between marketing and inequality. I argue that the dramatic rise of income inequality since 1970 […]
Yesterday, the New York Times ran a distressing story by personal finance reporter Tara Siegel Bernard about the increasing rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy protection. The story relies on a study that was recently released by professors Deborah Thorne of the University of Idaho, Pamela Foohey of the Indiana University Maurer School […]
Tamara R. Piety of Tulsa has written Advertising as Experimentation on Human Subjects. Here's the abstract: Within the industry, it is an article of faith that consumers distrust advertising. One reason for that distrust may be that they fear being manipulated. Yet the debate about advertising and manipulation always seems to revolve around how much manipulation […]
Rory Van Loo of BU has written Technology Regulation by Default: Platforms, Privacy, and the CFPB. Here's the abstract: In the absence of a technology-focused regulator, diverse administrative agencies have been forced to develop regulatory models for governing their sphere of the data economy. These largely uncoordinated efforts offer a laboratory of regulatory experimentation on governance architecture. […]
Jonathan Weinberg of Wayne State has written 'Know Everything that Can Be Known About Everybody': The Birth of the Credit Report, Villanova Law Review, Forthcoming. Here is the abstract: A remarkable amount of our personal information is in the hands of corporations such as the Experian credit bureau; strangers to us, they make their money by collecting our […]
William McGeveran of Minnesota has written The Duty of Data Security, 102 Minnesota Law Review (2018, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract: As data breaches become larger and more frequent, the question naturally arises: what precautions does the law require of the data custodians who hold our personal information in their digital files? What is the legal duty of […]
Susan Block-Lieb of Fordham has written Cities as a Source of Consumers’ Financial Empowerment, 34 Emory Bankruptcy Developments J. 388 (2018). Here's the abstract: Although cities are a poor place to situate consumer protection regulation, especially “top down” efforts to “command and control” lending decisions, they are an especially good source of consumer “empowerment” initiatives. Consumer […]
by Jeff Sovern When I surveyed consumer law professors about the content of their courses, I also asked them whether they read consumer contracts and mandated disclosures in their personal lives. Here is an excerpt, but the article has more: Not one professor reported always reading contracts or disclosures. In contrast, 57% said they rarely or […]