Discussing a resolution introduced by two Republican Congressmen to kill the CFPB's arbitration rule, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell observes: "For some reason, though, the idea of giving consumers the choice to participate in a court of law — a right enshrined in the Seventh Amendment — leaves some GOP legislators quaking in their loafers." […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
by Paul Alan Levy Two decisions were issued late yesterday in cases involving the procedures for adjudicating subpoenas seeking to identify anonymous Internet speakers who are accused of actionable speech. An appeals court in California embraced most elements of the Dendrite / Cahill test for deciding whether the plaintiff in such a case should be […]
The White House has withdrawn or removed from active consideration more than 800 regulations proposed during the Obama administration. Among the regulations are auto safety protections, environmental protections, worker protections, and a range of others. A New York Times article is here. Public Citizen's reaction is here. The list of remaining rules under consideration and […]
Peter Lurie — the current FDA associate commissioner for public health strategy and analysis and former deputy director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group — will become the President of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in September. Peter will succeed Mike Jacobson, who co-founded CSPI in 1971. Peter is terrific.
No doubt our readers have heard about the Congressional Budget Office's report on the repeal-only version of Trumpcare (sometimes pushed by Trump and often times pushed by ACA-hater purists). But if you want to actually read it, go here. The two key take-aways on number of people covered and premiums: The number of people who are […]
by Paul Alan Levy The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued an order signed only by the Clerk declaring that a significant free speech issue bearing on the rights of anonymous Internet users will be decided in a totally secret proceeding, involving sealed briefs, a sealed record, and without any […]
The New York Times reports: Tens of thousands of people who took out private loans to pay for college but have not been able to keep up payments may get their debts wiped away because critical paperwork is missing. The troubled loans, which total at least $5 billion, are at the center of a protracted […]
Anocha Aribarg and Eric M. Schwartz, both of Michigan's Business School, have written Consumer Responses to Native Advertising. Here's the abstract: Native advertising is a type of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) monitors this form of advertising and has […]
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 […]
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 […]