Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship

Floyd article on virtual RTO agreements

Carrie Floyd of Michigan has written New Tech, Old Problem: The Rise of Virtual Rent-to-Own Agreements, forthcoming at 65 Boston College Law Review 3 (2024). Here is the abstract: This Article explores how fintech has disrupted the traditional rent-to-own (RTO) industry, giving rise to new, virtual RTO agreements (VirTOs). These VirTOs have enabled the RTO […]

David Berman payday lending article

David Berman has written Lending Experimentalism: A New Regulatory Approach to Payday Loans, Forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law Policy, Here is the abstract: Payday loans entangle consumers with few alternatives in catastrophically harmful cycles of borrowing. But because of their design, payday loans are vexingly difficult to regulate effectively. This article explains how […]

Spitko Article: Arbitration Secrecy

E. Gary Spitko of Santa Clara has written Arbitration Secrecy, 108 Cornell Law Review 1729 (2023). Here’s the abstract: Parties to an arbitration contract may agree to a secrecy clause that will govern their arbitration process to protect the confidentiality of their proprietary or personal information. Of great concern, however, they also may use such an […]

Mark Budnitz’s brief essay on problems in modern consumer payments

Here, in the Los Angeles Lawyer (you might have to scroll to page 28). Among the topics discussed are FedNow and cryptocurrencey. Excerpt: Ominously, the introduction of consumer-facing chat-bots and other artificial intelligence devices has provided fraudsters with new and improved tools for deceiving consumers. At the same time, consumer transactions now routinely involve “click […]

Book Chapter: The Federal Arbitration Act Should Not Cover Consumer Claims

I wrote The FAA Should Not Cover Consumer Claims, to appear in The Federal Arbitration Act: Successes, Failures, and a Roadmap for Reform (Richard A. Bales & Jill I. Gross eds., forthcoming 2024 Cambridge University Press). Here is the abstract: Consumer protection laws face a fundamental enforcement issue: because consumer claims are typically for small […]

Burge article on uniform laws’ impact on crypto as a payment mechanism

Mark Edwin Burge of Texas A&M has written After FTX: Can the Original Bitcoin Use Case Be Saved?, 72 Kansas Law Review, (2023). Here is the abstract: Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies spawned by the innovation of blockchain programming have exploded in prominence, both in gains of massive market value and in dramatic market losses, […]

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 […]