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. […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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 […]
With the news that ESPN will become available through a streaming service, it looks like the cable market will be in for a shakeup, including potentially one that forces cable providers to "unbundle" their channel packages and enable consumers to pay only for the channels they want. This sounds like a good thing, right? Not […]
That is the question raised by the incoming Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to FBI assertions that the agency is entitled to use a device masquerading as a cell-phone tower to intercept your calls and texts in public. The Daily Dot explains the troubling technology at issue: The Stingray […]
(HT: Rosemary Shahan). Might be worth assigning to students learning about fraud and UDAP statutes.
…is the title of this NPR piece, which examines both how easy it is to lose one's license because of poverty (in Wisconsin, for instance, failure to pay a ticket can result in a two-year suspension, which is harsher than the penalty for either drunk driving or a hit-and-run), and how losing a driver's license […]