Here. Seems like there's another one of these kinds of stories every year. Here's an excerpt: 22,000 people have now found themselves legally bound to 1000 hours of community service, including, but not limited to, cleaning toilets at festivals, scraping chewing gum off the streets and “manually relieving sewer blockages”. The (hopefully) joke clause was […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Given the political and legal controversy over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's status as an independent agency, and the challenge to its structure pending en banc in the D.C. Circuit (go, for instance, here, here, and here), our readers may be interested in The Genesis of Independent Agencies by Patrick Corrigan and RIchard Revesz. Here is the abstract: The status […]
Two new lawsuits challenge conduct of Trump's "Election Integrity" Commission. ACLU v. Trump maintains that the Commission is meeting in secret and hiding its records in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Read the complaint here. And then there is Public Citizen v. U.S. Department of the Army, which Public Citizen describes this way: The Privacy Act […]
The Washington Post reports: Wells Fargo has received preliminary approval to pay out $142 million to customers affected by the bank’s sales practices scandal. A federal judge gave preliminary approval Saturday to the deal that would settle claims over fraudulent accounts going back to 2002. The San Francisco-based bank and lawyers for customers reached the […]
That's the name of this article by C. Ryan Barber (possibly behind a paywall). Here's an excerpt: When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau expanded its public database to include narratives of negative customer experiences, banks such as Wells Fargo and other industry players worried about being named and shamed. Now, a new public database could be going up […]
I try not to use the blog to tout Public Citizen's own work, but nonetheless want to provide two updates on our work to maintain protections for student borrowers in the face of a Department of Education no longer interested in doing so: First, on Friday, Public Citizen and Harvard's Project on Predatory Student Lending […]
CFPB director Richard Cordray's prepared remarks on the new arbitration rule: Thank you for joining us on this call. Today, we are announcing a final rule that prevents financial companies from using mandatory arbitration clauses to deny groups of consumers their day in court. A cherished tenet of our justice system is that no one, […]
We’ve issued a new rule on arbitration to help groups of people take companies to court July 10, 2017 If you have opened a bank or credit card account, it’s likely that your contract included an arbitration clause. Arbitration clauses can limit your options if you have a legal issue with a financial […]
Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission announced two actions potentially of interest to readers: The FTC announced that it halted an operation that unlawfully shared and sold consumers' sensitive data. The operators of a lead generation business agreed to settle charges brought by the FTC that the company misled consumers into filling out loan applications and […]