by Jeff Sovern We now have reason to believe that validation notices fail to convey to consumers the information Congress wants consumers to have. If the CFPB addresses validation notices in its regulation, courts can simply follow the Bureau's lead. But it could be years before that regulation takes effect. What should courts do in the […]
Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship
Christopher T. Robertson of Arizona and Harvard's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics has written A Trojan Horse? How Expansion of the First Amendment Threatens Much More than the Regulation of Off-Label Drugs, forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal. Here is the abstract: Scholars, advocates, and courts have begun to recognize […]
by Jeff Sovern We need to make some revisions to our validation article discussion draft, in Part V A.1., beginning on page 27, and captioned "Did Respondents Understand that The Letter Said They Could Dispute the Validity of the Debt?" Consequently, please don't use that part of the article until the new version is on the web. […]
Here. Here's the beginning of the Executive Summary: Lenders normally want borrowers who will pay back their loans in full. This seems obvious—otherwise, won’t the lender lose money? Yet in the high-rate installment loan market, the normal incentive to make affordable loans does not work. When loans have high interest rates, lenders may seek out […]
Daria Roithmayr of USC, Justin Chin, a USC law student, and Bruce Levin, an Emory biology professor, have written Cat and Mouse: A Dynamic Analysis of Predatory Payday Lending. Here's the abstract: Legal actors and the regulators who pursue them often engage in a co-evolutionary game of cat and mouse, as each innovates to out-compete […]
Mary Spector of SMU and Ann Baddour of Texas Appleseed, Fair Financial Services Project, have written Collection Texas-Style: An Analysis of Consumer Collection Practices in and Out of the Courts, 67 Hastings Law Journal (2016). Here's the abstract: As many as forty-four percent of Texans with credit files have non-mortgage debt in collection; this is more […]
by Jeff Sovern Last week, I posted the abstract for our article, Are Validation Notices Valid? An Empirical Evaluation of Consumer Understanding of Debt Collection Validation Notices. In this post, I wanted to write about something that didn’t appear in the abstract: the extent to which respondents thought a collection letter said the collector would […]
Joseph M Hnylka of Nova Southeastern has written Continuing to Litigate after You Have Won: Courts Defy Article III to Avoid Mooting TCPA Class Actions, Despite Defendants’ Rule 68 Offers of Complete Relief, 64 Drake Law Review (2016). Here's the abstract: Every day, thousands of ordinary Americans receive unwelcome faxes, text messages, and prerecorded telephone calls […]
by Jeff Sovern My co-author, Kate Walton, and I have posted a draft of our new article, Are Validation Notices Valid? An Empirical Evaluation of Consumer Understanding of Debt Collection Validation Notices to SSRN. We would love comments on this version. Here's the abstract: A principal protection against the collection of consumer debts that are […]
by Jeff Sovern If I had known about this study a few days ago, I would have added it to my list for John Oliver. The study is Jonathan A. Obar & Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch, The Biggest Lie on the Internet: Ignoring the Privacy Policies and Terms of Service Policies of Social Networking Services (2016). The […]