Each month, NPR broadcasts a story, “Bill of the Month,” about a medical billing issue. In this month’s, a hospital confused two patients who have the same first and last names (their middle initials are different, but that didn’t prevent the mistake) and sent a bill to the wrong one. Eventually, a debt collector dunned […]
Category Archives: Debt Collection
Claire Johnson Raba of Irvine has written Co-Opting California Courts: How Private Creditors Have Turned the Judiciary Into a Predatory Student Debt Collection Machine. Here is the abstract: In a report, Claire Johnson Raba, a SBPC fellow and clinical teaching fellow at the University of California Irvine School of Law’s Consumer Law Clinic, shows the […]
Here. Some other notable findings: Requests to stop particular types of communication are often ignored by collectors. Most survey respondents indicated that debt collectors generally do not comply with requests from consumers to cease contacting them via a particular method of communication—in violation of Regulation F. * * * Collection of time-barred debts continued, including […]
From the announcement: The American Law Institute’s Council voted today to approve the launch of a Principles of the Law project that will address a serious challenge facing state courts: the adjudication of high-volume, high-stakes, low-dollar-value civil claims. The project will be led by Reporter David Freeman Engstrom of Stanford Law School. These types of […]
Last year, we published a link to Daniel Wilf-Townsend's Harvard Law Review article Assembly-Line Plaintiffs. Now Jessica Steinberg of George Washington, Colleen F. Shanahan of Columbia, Anna E. Carpenter of Utah, and Alyx Mark of Wesleyan's Dept. of Government and the American Bar Foundation have written a response to it, The Democratic (Il)legitimacy of Assembly-Line […]
We received the following Call for Papers: On April 6, 2022, in addition to announcing an extension of the federal student loan payment pause, the White House announced that the U.S. Department of Education is taking steps to give a fresh start to millions of struggling borrowers who are currently in default on their federal […]
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: 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 […]
Erik Durbin and Charles J. Romeo, both of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have written The Economics of Debt Collection, with Attention to the Issue of Salience of Collections at the Time Credit Is Granted, 16 Journal of Credit Risk (2020). Here is the abstract: This paper considers the role of policies that protect consumers from […]