…is the title of a Post op-ed questioning whether federal student loan assistance is most wisely allocated toward grad schools. The piece questions, in particular, low-rate loans for law students: Nowhere has Grad PLUS [the government's loan assistance program for graduate students] had a greater impact than in the nation’s law schools. Law-student indebtedness grew […]
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A 135-page class-action-complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Los Angeles alleges that the major car manufacturers are liable because their keyless ignition systems create a carbon monoxide hazard. This story by Jonathan Stempel explains: Ten of the world's biggest automakers were sued on Wednesday by U.S. consumers who claim they concealed the risks of carbon […]
The city is D.C., according to the Washington Post. The reason? The high cost of childcare. According to the article, childcare "can be as expensive as housing in some parts of the country." Here's the story, which breaks down cost of living for singles and families and also contains a neat interactive graphic.
As we've discussed previously, almost exactly a year ago Public Citizen sued on behalf of Wisconsin consumer Cindy Cox after employees of an online retailer called Accessory Outlet threatened her with fines and derogatory credit reporting for saying that she would dispute a charge with her credit card company when her order had not arrived. […]
Want to know which drugs, medical devices, foods, cosmetics, dietary supplements, etc. may be contaminated, defective, or mislabeled? The Food and Drug Administration regularly issues safety alerts through its MedWatch system. For instance, go here, for the agency's July 2015 safety alerts. The MedWatch home page is here. You can report a problem here, and […]
The Washington Post yesterday published an eye-opening expose concerning the practice of buying monetary settlements for lead poisoning from the victims for a fraction of what they are worth — as little as 9 cents on the dollar. As the Post documents, the victims are often cash-strapped, have little education and sometimes mental disabilities, and […]
The FTC sued Wyndham Worldwide (the company that operates Wyndham Hotels) for unfair and deceptive trade practices under the FTCA after Wyndham sustained data breaches in 2008 and 2009 leading to more than $10.5 million in fraudulent charges to consumers. The FTC charged that Wyndham's security was deficient and its policies misled consumers. Yesterday, in […]
by Paul Alan Levy This spring I reported on a decision of the Virginia Supreme Court that overturned a contempt citation against Yelp for honoring its users First Amendment right to post pseudonymous criticisms of a Virginia merchant called Hadeed Carpet Cleaning, because Hadeed refused to present any evidence that the reviewers had made any […]
We've covered before the ongoing fight over employers' responsibility to provide insurance that covers contraception, a mandate that some employers argue violates their religious beliefs. The opening of the argument in the Solicitor General's brief in opposition to certiorari in Priests for Life v. HHS summarizes the state of the law as the Court considers whether […]
In a split decision Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down a portion of an SEC rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose whether their products “have not been found to be ‘DRC conflict free’”—a term defined to mean that they do not […]