Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship

An Overseas Look at Binding Arbitration Clauses

Bruce Wardhaugh of the School of Law–Queen's University Belfast haas written Unveiling Fairness for the Consumer:  The Law, Economics and Justice of Expanded Arbitration, forthcoming in the Loyola Consumer Law Review. Here is the abstract: In recent years, the US Supreme Court has rather controversially extended the ambit of the Federal Arbitration Act to extend […]

Peter Holland Study of Debt Buyer Collection Suits Finds Mass Produced Default Judgments

Peter A. Holland of Maryland has written Junk Justice: A Statistical Analysis of 4,400 Lawsuits Filed by Debt Buyers, 26 Loyola Consumer Law Reporter 179 (2014).  Here's the abstract: Debt buyers have flooded courts nationwide with collection lawsuits against consumers. This article reports the findings from the broadest in-depth study of debt buyer litigation outcomes […]

Dennis Hirsch Article Proposes Sectoral Global Privacy Rules

Dennis D. Hirsch of Capital has written In Search of the Holy Grail: Achieving Global Privacy Rules Through Sector-Based Codes of Conduct, 74 Ohio St. L.J. (2013). Here is the abstract: The movement of personal data across national borders is fundamental to the Internet economy. Yet the laws that govern such data flows remain national […]

Levitin & Ratcliffe Chapter on the Duty to Serve in Housing Finance

Adam J. Levitin of Georgetown and Janneke Ratcliffe the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Community Capital have written Rethinking Duties to Serve in Housing Finance, in Homeownership Built to Last:  Lessons from the Housing Crisis on Sustaining Homeownership for Low-Income and Minority Families (Brookings 2014).  Here is the abstract: In this […]

CRL Chapter on Car-Title Lending

Susanna  Montezemolo of the Center for Responsible Lending haas written Car-Title Lending.  Here is the abstract: Provides an overview of car-title lending and its impact on U.S. households. Car-title lending — making expensive loans secured by the title of a vehicle a borrower owns outright — has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. […]

Elizabeth Renuart Updates Foreclosure Paper

In August we posted a link to a paper Albany's Elizabeth Renuart had written, Uneasy Intersections: The Right to Foreclose and the U.C.C., 48 Wake Forest L. Rev. 1205 (2013),    The paper has already drawn more than 500 downloads.  An updated version is now available.  Here is the revised abstract: Historically, the practice of […]

Writings on the Postal Service Offering Banking Services

by Jeff Sovern There's been a lot of discussion recently about whether the Post Office should offer banking services.  The idea is that it could serve the unbanked, and that its many existing branches would cover the entire country (Disclosure: one of my brothers works for the Postal Service, though we haven't discussed this idea).  For […]

Mark Budnitz Article on Georgia’s Primary Consumer Protection Statute

Mark Elliott Budnitz of Georgia State has written Buyer Beware: Georgia Consumers Can't Rely on the Fair Business Practices Act, 6 John Marshall Law Journal  507 (2013).  Here is the abstract: In Novare Group, Inc. v. Sarif, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected the plaintiffs' claim that the defendant brokers and developers violated the Georgia Fair […]

Economists’ Paper: Regulating Automobiles: The Consequences for Consumers

Colleen E. Haight of San Jose State University and Derek Thieme of George Mason University's Mercatus Center have written Regulating Automobiles: The Consequences for Consumers.  Here is the abstract: Automobiles are ubiquitous. Most Americans take at least one car trip every day to get to work or school or to run household errands. The automobile […]

IMF Researchers on the Impact of Foreclosure Laws on the Supply of Credit

Jihad Dagher and Yangfan Sun, both of the International Monetary Fund, have written Borrower Protection and the Supply of Credit: Evidence from Foreclosure Laws.  Here's the abstract: Laws governing the foreclosure process, which vary across jurisdictions, have direct consequences on creditors’ losses from borrower default, and thus, could potentially affect lending decisions. Our empirical strategy […]