Emanwel J. Turnbull has written Opting Out of the Procedural Morass: A Solution to the Class Arbitration Problem, forthcoming in the Widener L. Rev. Here's the abstract: American class actions are internationally regarded as a procedural form to avoid and widely criticized in the United States. They have been narrowed and restricted by U.S. statutes […]
Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship
James P. Nehf of Indiana University has written Open Book: The Failed Promise of Information Privacy in America. Here's the abstract: With financial and other personal information about us in countless databases, and with companies such as Facebook and Google collecting data about their users to drive profits and satisfy expectations of shareholders, there is […]
John E. Campbell of Denver has created a video on the mortgage crisis. Here's the abstract (yes, there's an abstract): Before becoming a law professor, much of my work was as a litigator and appellate attorney. I became increasingly passionate about the problems that exist in the mortgage industry. I also became increasingly aware that […]
Shauhin A. Talesh of Irvine has written How Dispute Resolution System Design Matters: An Organizational Analysis of Dispute Resolution Structures and Consumer Lemon Laws, 46 Law & Society Review (2012). Here's the abstract: This study demonstrates how the structure of dispute resolution shapes the extent to which managerial and business values influence the meaning and implementation of […]
David Korn and David Rosenberg of Harvard have written Concepcion's Pro-Defendant Biasing of the Arbitration Process: The Class Counsel Solution. Here's the abstract: By mandating that numerous plaintiffs litigate their common question claims separately in individual arbitrations rather than jointly in class action arbitrations, the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion created a […]
by Jeff Sovern I've moved on to the privacy chapter of our casebook, and in that regard I just finished reading M. Ryan Calo's (Calo is at the University of Washington and affilated with Stanford) intriguing Against Notice Skepticism In Privacy (And Elsewhere), 87 Notre Dame Law Review 1027 (2012). Before I add my two […]
Richard Frankel of Drexel has written The Arbitration Clause as Super Contract. Here's the abstract: It is widely acknowledged that the purpose of the Federal Arbitration Act was to place arbitration clauses on “equal footing” with other contracts. Nonetheless,federal and state courts have placed arbitration clauses on a pedestal by creating special interpretive rules for […]
Kathleen C. Engel of Suffolk Patricia A. McCoy of Connecticut have written Federal Preemption and Consumer Financial Protection: Past and Future, 3 Banking & Financial Services Policy Report 25 (2012). Here is the abstract: Many states and cities filled the void by passing anti-predatory lending laws of their own. Lenders, worried about potential liability, quickly organized a […]
by Jeff Sovern Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a Ph.D candidate from the University of Amsterdam, Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, who is researching privacy regulation and behavioral targeting. He asked me if I could refer him to a book that explores when disclosure is an appropriate response to consumer protection problems […]
Dee Pridgen of Wyoming has written Sea Changes in Consumer Financial Protection: Stronger Agency and Stronger Laws. I read this one before it was posted and found it particularly useful in pulling together some recent themes in consumer law and explaining how the Dodd-Frank Act's anti-predatory lending rules are based on behavioral economics, as opposed to […]