Victor Stango of UC Davis Graduate School of Management has written Are Payday Lending Markets Competitive? Regulation (Fall 2012) at 26. Here's the abstract: The rapid and widespread growth of the payday loan market has sparked considerable controversy, in part regarding the “high” prices charged for these loans. This article presents several new pieces of […]
Category Archives: Consumer Law Scholarship
Shay Lavie of Harvard has written The Malleability of Collective Litigation, forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review. Here is the abstract: In Wal-Mart v. Dukes (131 S.Ct. 2541 [2011]), Wal-Mart avoided class action because employment decisions were made by local supervisors. However, it was Wal-Mart who chose to delegate discretion; by doing so, it […]
Daniel A. Austin of Northeastern has written The Indentured Generation: Bankruptcy and Student Loan Debt, 53 Santa Clara Law Review (forthcoming) Here's the abstract: A generation of Americans has borrowed heavily for their education, and hundreds of thousands of them are deeply in debt. Some 37 million Americans owe a total of approximately $1 trillion […]
Oren Bar-Gill has written Seduction by Contract: Law, Economics and Psychology in Consumer Markets (Oxford University Press 2012). The Introduction is available here. Here's the abstract: Consumers routinely enter into contracts with providers of goods and services. These contracts are designed by sophisticated sellers to exploit the psychological biases of consumers. They provide short-term benefits, while imposing […]
Chunlin Leonhard of Loyola University New Orleans has written The Subprime Mortgage Crisis and Economic Checks and Balances, Banking & Financial Services Policy Report, June 2012, at 15. Here's the abstract: This article examines contract law’s role in the subprime mortgage crisis, specifically in the way that the laissez faire paradigm of traditional contract law […]
Judith L. Fox of Notre Dame has written How Forum Determines Substance in Judicial Debt Collection, 31 Banking and Financial Services Rev. 11 (August 2012). Here's the abstract: In an email to the Small Claims Task Force, a committee appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court to investigate allegations of abuse in the Marion County Small […]
Paige Marta Skiba of Vanderbilt, Marieke Bos of Stockholm University – Swedish Institute for Social Research and Susan Carter of the United States Military Academy have written The Pawn Industry and Its Customers: The United States and Europe. Here's the abstract: As humankind’s oldest financial institution, pawnbroking has served the financial needs of low-income families […]
Adi Osovsky, a Harvard SJD candidate, has written The Misconception of the Consumer as a Homo Economicus: A Behavioral Economic Approach to Consumer Protection in the Credit Reporting System, forthcoming in the Suffolk University Law Review. Here's the abstract: The significant increase in the number of consumer transactions, along with the expansion of information technology, […]
Amitai Etzioni has written The Privacy Merchants: What is to Be Done? Here is the abstract: Rights have been long understood, first and foremost, as protection of the private from the public, the individual from the State. True, we also recognize positive rights (such as socioeconomic rights) and the government’s duty to protect citizens from violations […]
David J. Reiss of Brooklyn has written Comment on the Use of Eminent Domain to Restructure Performing Loans. Here is the abstract: There has been a lot of fear-mongering by financial industry trade groups over the widespread use of eminent domain to restructure residential mortgages. While there may be legitimate business reasons to oppose its […]