Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship

Mark Budnitz discusses the effects of payments developments on low-income consumers at the Ballard Spahr Consumer Finance Monitor podcast

Here. The discussion draws on Professor Budnitz’s article, New Developments in Payment Systems and Services Affecting Low-Income Consumers: Challenges and Opportunities, Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy (2023).

Luke Herrine paper: Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty

Luke Herrine of Alabama has written Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty. Here’s the abstract: We seem to be in the middle of a paradigm shift in consumer protection. For decades, regulators understood their mission as “preserving choice” through more effective informational remedies. In the past decade — and more decisively during the Biden Administration — […]

Andrea Boyack Article: The Shape of Consumer Contracts

Andrea J. Boyack of Washburn has written The Shape of Consumer Contracts, Denver Law Review (2023 Forthcoming). Here is the abstract: Modern consumer contracts are the bane of contract law and theory. Freedom of contract justifications are premised on party autonomy and transactional efficiency, but theories justifying contract enforcement fail to explain why the law should […]

Samsungs, iPhones and Not-So-Smartphone Disclosures

Last year, my co-author, Nahal Heydari, and I posted on SSRN a draft of our article, Not-So-Smartphone Disclosures, forthcoming in the Arkansas Law Review. We recently posted a new draft of the piece. The earlier draft reported, among other things, that consumers understood credit card disclosures less well on smartphones than on laptops and desktops […]

Study examining content and readability of terms of use illustrates how crazy arbitration opt-outs have become

Tim Samples of the University of Georgia – Terry College of Business, Katherine Ireland of the University of Georgia Libraries, and Caroline Kraczon, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have written TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2023). Here’s an excerpt from the article about […]

Arbel & Becher paper on the pluses and minuses of consumers using smart readers for form contracts

Yonathan A. Arbel of Alabama and Samuel Becher of the Victoria University of Wellington have written How Smart are Smart Readers? LLMs and the Future of the No-Reading Problem. Here’s the abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to summarize and simplify complex texts. In this study, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art models […]

Another podcast episode that may be of interest to readers of the CL&P blog

Ballard Spahr’s Alan Kaplinsky interviewed Arthur E. Wilmarth, Professor Emeritus at GW, about crypto and its regulation at this week’s episode of the Consumer Finance Monitor podcast. I learned some things from the discussion that I plan to incorporate in my Payments Systems class next spring. Some of the discussion drew on Professor Wilmarth’s forthcoming […]

Raba report on the burdens of debt collection litigation

Claire Johnson Raba of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law and California, Irvine has written One-Sided Litigation: Lessons from Civil Docket Data in California Debt Collection Lawsuits. Here’s the abstract: A study by Claire Johnson Raba, a researcher with the Debt Collection Lab, shows that debt cases are an increasing burden on consumers and […]

Maria Glover’s latest mass arbitration article

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 […]