Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship

Study finds consumer medical data breaches can cause consumers to switch providers and increase gym visits

Junyuan Ke and Weiguang Wang, both of the University of Rochester – Simon Business School and Natasha Zhang Foutz, Associate Professor of Commerce at the University of Virginia, have written Heterogeneous Consumer Response and Mitigation toward Healthcare Data Breach: Insights from Location Big Data. Here is the abstract: Data breaches pose grave dangers to consumers, […]

SBPC’s Mark Huelsman report: the student loan IDR system creates a debt trap

Mark Huelsman of the Student Borrower Protection Center has written Driving Runaway Debt: How IDR’s Current Design Buries Borrowers Under Billions of Dollars in Unaffordable Interest. Here's the abstract: This report highlights how the design of the main protection meant to deliver affordability to federal student loan borrowers, Income-Driven Repayment (IDR), ignores the widespread effects that […]

Anita Allen Article on Race and Online Privacy

Anita L. Allen of Penn has written Dismantling the Black Opticon: Race Equity and Online Privacy and Data Protection Reform, forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. Here’s the abstract: In the opening decades of the 21st century popular online platforms rapidly transformed the world. These platforms have come with benefits, but a heavy price to […]

Paper on Removing Barriers to Mortgage Credit for Black Homebuyers

Michelle Aronowitz and Vanessa Gail Perry of George Washington have written Homeward Bound: Removing Barriers to Mortgage Credit for Black Homebuyers. Here’s the abstract: We analyze some of the key barriers to Black homeownership and propose several solutions that promise to expand homeownership opportunities, lower the costs of homeownership, and hasten equity accumulation for Black […]

Block-LIeb & Janger article proposes changes in unconscionability rules

Susan Block-Lieb of Fordham and Edward J. Janger of Brooklyn have written Fit for its Ordinary Purpose: Implied Warranties and Common Law Duties for Consumer Finance Contracts, 59 Houston Law Review 3 (2021). Here’s the abstract: The history of consumer goods and consumer credit markets presents an anomaly: market transactions for consumer goods and credit […]

Blasie on Plain Language Laws

Michael Blasie of Pennsylvania State University, Dickinson Law has written The Rise of Plain Language Laws, University of Miami Law Review, 2022 Forthcoming. Here is the abstract: When lawmakers enacted 778 plain language laws across the United States, no one noticed. Apart from a handful, these laws went untracked and unstudied. Without study, large questions remain […]

Chandrasekher study finds lack of diversity among arbitrators

Andrea Chandrasekher of California, Davis has written An Empirical Investigation of Diversity in U.S. Arbitration. Here is the abstract: For decades, the United States system of arbitration has been subject to nearly constant public criticism. Calling arbitration a rigged judicial system, consumer and employee rights groups have voiced opposition to the practice of “forced arbitration” whereby […]

Victoria Barnes on Anne Fleming’s Scholarship

Victoria Barnes of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory has written Anne Fleming’s History of Law and Consumer Finance, 22  Enterprise & Society 316 (2021). Here's the abstract: This article has teased out Anne Flemings’s interests and the overarching themes in her research. It shows how these themes and interests influenced […]

Harvard Law Review to publish Wilf-Townsend article: Assembly-Line Plaintiffs

Daniel Wilf-Townsend of Chicago has written Assembly-Line Plaintiffs, Forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review. Here is the abstract: Around the country, state courts are being flooded with the claims of massive repeat filers. These large corporate plaintiffs leverage economies of scale to bring tremendous quantities of low-value claims against largely unrepresented individual defendants. Using recently developed […]

Hawkins & Penner essay about advertising, racial steering, and lending

Jim Hawkins of Houston and Tiffany Penner have written Advertising Injustices: Marketing Race and Credit in America, 70 Emory Law Journal 1619 (2021). Here is the abstract: Access to affordable credit played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement. But today, racial and ethnic minorities oversubscribe to high-cost lending products like payday loans and underuse […]