by Jeff Sovern As we have previously discussed, the CFPB takes the position when supervising banks that discrimination is unfair within the meaning of the Consumer Financial Protection Act. As reported by Bloomberg's Evan Weinberger, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association, the Consumer Bankers Association, and others have now sued the CFPB in […]
Category Archives: Consumer Litigation
So reports George Simons at Bloomberg Law. Excerpt: California, Arizona, and Minnesota are good examples of states attempting to increase access to justice while charging defendants enormous filing fees. These fees are charged for all types of civil lawsuits, but are particularly relevant to debt lawsuits where defendants are being sued because, presumably, they don’t […]
Here. Excerpt: After years of struggling to make payments that hardly put a dent in the loans she took out to attend a now defunct arts school, Victoria Linssen saw a glimmer of hope. A deal last month between 39 states and Navient, a student lending giant accused of unfairly ensnaring borrowers like her, would […]
Here. Excerpt: Since the 70’s, the FCRA has allowed consumers with credit reporting claims to recover up to $1,000 per statutory violation of the law, while the FDCPA allows statutory damages up to $1000 per case even when multiple violations of the law are present. It is decades-past time for an update. An annual inflation […]
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 […]
James E. McNulty a finance professor at Florida Atlantic University has written Consumer Protection Settlements: Theory and Policy. Here's the abstract: Lawsuits have a deterrent effect, but this is mitigated if settlements are routine. Regulators and judges should consider that a firm contemplating predatory activity directed at financially unsophisticated individuals might have built an estimate of […]
Adam S. Zimmerman of Loyola of Los Angeles has written The Class Appeal, 89 University of Chicago Law Review (Forthcoming 2022). Here's the abstract: For a wide variety of claims against the government, the federal courthouse doors are closed to all but those brought by powerful, organized interests. This is because hundreds of laws—colloquially known […]
Here's the press release: STUDY SHOWS HOW LAWSUITS SAVE LIVES AND CAN MITIGATE OUR NATION’S MOST SERIOUS CRISES NEW YORK — The Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School (CJ&D) released today Lifesavers 2021: CJ&D’s Guide to Lawsuits that Protect Us All. The study describes over 125 lawsuits that have led to major safety […]
Yesterday, Tara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times published a story providing an update on the claims process in the Equifax data breach litigation. The deadline to file initial claims was January 22, 2020. She reports that as of December 1, 2019, “just more than 10 percent of the consumers affected had filed for […]
Yesterday, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued an opinion in Nelson v. Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc. in which it concluded that the federal Higher Education Act (HEA) does not preempt state law claims against student loan servicers. The case involves a student loan borrower who brought a […]