Category Archives: U.S. Supreme Court

Industry Lawyers Warn Against Eliminating the CFPB

Joann Needleman and Manny Newburger have an essay in the American Banker, In the fight over the CFPB, everyone could end up a loser. It’s behind a paywall but accessible on Lexis. You can read more about Needleman and Newburger at their linked bios. They write: Opponents of the CFPB risk throwing out the good with […]

SCOTUS to review CFPB’s constitutionality–again

Earlier today the Supreme Court announced that it would take the case in which the Fifth Circuit had held the CFPB’s funding mechanism was unconstitutional, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, Limited. The Bureau had asked the Court to hear the case during the current term but the Court instead decided to […]

Chao paper suggests unjust enrichment claims confer standing, even after TransUnion

Bernard Chao of Denver has written Unjust Enrichment: Standing Up for Privacy Rights. Here is the abstract: In TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, one of the country’s largest credit reporting agencies violated the Federal Credit Report Act (“FCRA”) by failing to “follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy . . ..” As a result, thousands of […]

Breaking: SCOTUS rules that “a necessary feature” of an ATDS “is the capacity to use a random or sequential number generator to either store or produce phone numbers to be called”

Here, in Facebook v. Duguid. In other words, if all the device does is call numbers that you specificaly tell it to call, it's not an ATDS within the meaning of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

SCOTUS takes FCRA class action case

The issue as framed by the petitioner, TransUnion, is whether "either Article III or Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 permits a damages class action when the vast majority of the class suffered no actual injury, let alone an injury anything like what the class representative suffered." More at SCOTUSblog.

NBC News Story About How Potential SCOTUS Nominee Brett Kavanaugh “could reverse a century of financial regulation”

by Jeff Sovern Here.  Kavanaugh, of course, took the position in PHH that the CFPB is unconstitutional as currently structured.  Whether other potential nominees would have felt differently if they had decided PHH is unknown.

Can the California Anti-Arbitration Bill Survive FAA Preemption?

by Jeff Sovern Reuters reports that the bill has passed an Assembly committee, and is expected to pass the Assembly in August (the state Senate has already passed it).  Here's the part I don't understand: if California enacts the law, how can it avoid being preempted under the Federal Arbitration Act, as SCOTUS has interpreted […]

A Few More Thoughts On Henson v. Santander

by Jeff Sovern As we reported a couple weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Henson v. Santander that debt buyers are not automatically debt collectors under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.   However, debt buyers which have debt collection as the principal purpose of their business should still qualify as debt collectors under the statute (the […]