Last month, we recommended an NPR story discussing the problem of collections against low-income hospital patients. In response to this problem (as reported by the New York Times), "The Obama administration has adopted sweeping new rules to discourage nonprofit hospitals from using aggressive tactics to collect payments from low-income patients. Under the rules, nonprofit hospitals […]
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Resolving a split among the federal courts of appeals in favor of consumers, the Supreme Court held today in Jesinoski v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., that a consumer may exercise the right to rescind a loan under the federal Truth in Lending Act simply by notifying the creditor rather than (as the creditor contended and […]
From The Hill: On the heels of President Obama’s call for stronger cybersecurity protections on Monday, Sen. Mark Warner, (D-Va.) called on regulators to force banks to issue chip-and-PIN debit and credit cards to better protect American consumers from data breaches. “The President’s measure takes strong steps towards ensuring cards used by the federal government […]
This pro-environment proposal seems to be attracting support across the political spectrum. Read a prominent conservative's argument for it here. He's got a lot of arguments that don't concern the environment, and he notes that "even for global warming skeptics, there’s no reason not to welcome a benign measure that induces prudential reductions in CO2 […]
In a victory for workers, last week the California Supreme Court held that when a security guard is required to be at his or her worksite on call, the worker is entitled to be compensated, no matter what percent of the time on call is spent actually responding to disturbances. As discussed in this L.A. […]
The Washington Post reports today on churches in Virginia helping members of their congregations avoid payday lenders. The churches provide collateral so that the member can qaulfy for a loan through a church-affiliated credit union. Read Churches step in with alternative to high-interest, small-dollar lending industry.
In Safe Banking, law professor Adam Levitin talks about this: Banking is based on two fundamentally irreconcilable functions: safekeeping of deposits and relending of deposits. Safekeeping is meant to be a risk-free function, but using deposits to fund loans inevitably poses risk to deposits, thereby undermining the safekeeping function. The expensive, inefficient, and unreliable apparatus […]
Good discussion on the Tech and Marketing Law Blog here of Rodman v. Safeway Inc., 2014 WL 6984703 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 10, 2014), where the trial court upheld plaintiffs' contention that Safeway promised to charge in-store prices for products ordered online (even though, in actuality, that is not what it was actually charging) and refused […]
This must-read New York Times article tells the powerful cautionary tale of what happens when damage caps depress lawyers' incentives to take meritorious product-defect cases: life-threatening dangers persist, with deadly results. The public might have learned of the G.M. ignition-switch problem through litigation as early as 2007, but given caps on damages, the economics of […]
The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs announced this week that it has reached a settlement with collection company National Credit Adjusters (NCA) over collections on illegal payday loans. The Kansas-based company will pay approximately $1 million in restitution and the Department estimates over 4,600 New Yorkers will be eligible for compensation. NCA will […]