by Deepak Gupta Back in June, I blogged about my firm's constitutional challenge to New York's credit-card surcharge law — a law that aims to protect credit card company profits by preventing merchants from communicating the true cost of credit to consumers. This morning, U.S District Judge Jed Rakoff issued a fantastic 35-page opinion agreeing […]
Category Archives: Consumer Litigation
by Deepak Gupta Legal reporter Alison Frankel of Reuters has a new column highlighting the effort to seek full-court rehearing of the Third Circuit's troubling decision in Carrera v. Bayer, which holds that plaintiffs must show, before they can certify a class, how they will identify and prove the class membership of consumers who purchased the defendant's product. […]
by Paul Bland, Senior Attorney, Public Justice, Of Counsel, Chavez & Gertler On Twitter @PblandBland In Kennedy v. Wells Fargo, Judge King of the Southern District of Florida enforced another arbitration clause that tosses out consumer claims in the multi district litigation involving checking overdraft claims. The plaintiffs had several arguments that the particular arbitration clause at […]
by Deepak Gupta This morning, the Eighth Circuit issued its decision in Charvat v. Mutual First, reversing the dismissal of two consumer class actions on constitutional standing grounds. The district court held that the plaintiff's claims — for violations of a federal law requiring on-machine notice of ATM fees — didn't allege an "injury in […]
by Jeff Sovern A couple of weeks ago, Ira Rheingold and I had an op-ed in the Times about issues with credit reports. Almost on cue, the Associated Press reports Jury awards Oregon woman $18.6M over credit report. It seems she had been trying to get Equifax to correct errors for two years. In the op-ed, […]
by Jeff Sovern Here (behind paywall). Excerpt: Court decisions tied to the 1968 law fell 18% year over year during a12-month period that ended May 31, to 1,037, data from the National ConsumerLaw Center shows. That number is down 38% from the peak two years earlier. The pace of new litigation is also slowing. […]
An 11-judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument this week in Kilgore v. Keybank, an important consumer arbitration case. Kilgore presents the question whether the Federal Arbitration Act and the Supreme Court's decision in AT&T v. Concepcion require courts to enforce arbitration clauses even when they would block consumers from pursuing […]
Next month, David Vladeck will a leave the helm of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection–by all accounts reinvograted under his dynamic leadership–to go back to Georgetown Law. Jeff Gelles, the Philadelphia Inquirer's consumer columnist, attempts to sum up David's tenure in a piece entitled "Consumer chief leaves FTC a feistier place." A snippet: Speaking […]
Next Wednesday (November 21), at noon, I'll be presenting a free webinar focusing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's amicus program from both consumer and industry perspectives. On the industry side, I'll be joined by Alan Kaplinsky and Christopher Willis of Ballard Spahr's Consumer Financial Services Group. We'll discuss the factors likely to influence the […]
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Sorrell v. IMS Health, there’s been a lot of speculation about the extent to which previously accepted commercial speech regulation may now be subject to “heightened” or strict scrutiny under the First Amendment. Sensing an opportunity, lawyers who regularly represent consumer reporting agencies invoked […]