Category Archives: Uncategorized

Price Controls on Payment Card Interchange Fees: The U.S. Experience

That's the name of this article by Zywicki, Manne, and Morris. Here is the abstract:  The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation capped debit card interchange fees for banks with assets of $10 billion. Credit card and prepaid card interchange fees were not regulated. The cap, which took effect on October 11, 2011, […]

Supreme Court: Despite FDA regulation of misbranded food, POM Wonderful may sue Coca-Cola under the Lanham Act for allegedly deceptive ads

Read this morning's Supreme Court 8-0 decision here. (Justice Breyer did not participate.) The first three paragraphs of Justice Kennedy's opinion sum things up nicely: POM Wonderful LLC makes and sells pomegranate juice products, including a pomegranate-blueberry juiceblend. App. 23a. One of POM’s competitors is the Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola’s Minute Maid Division makes a juice […]

Should People at GM Be Prosecuted for Homicide?

by Jeff Sovern That's the question raised by my letter in the Times.  Here's the relevant portion of the letter: Candice Anderson was charged with manslaughter and ultimately pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide for an accident leading to the death of her boyfriend. Now that G.M. has concluded that the accident was caused not by […]

Victory in Second Circuit for people with reading disabilities

Last summer, we told you about my office's amicus brief in the Second Circuit on behalf of 15 leading national disability rights organizations and academic researchers. The case is Authors Guild, Inc. v. Hathitrust, No. 12-4547, and the brief urged the court of appeals to uphold a district court ruling that the HathiTrust's effort to make […]

Thrown Out of Court–How corporations became people you can’t sue

That's the title of this article about binding consumer arbitration by Lina Khan, a reporter and policy analyst with the Markets, Enterprise and Resiliency Initiative at the New America Foundation. I was alerted to this article by arbitration expert Paul Bland at Public Justice. Paul called it "one of the best pieces of journalism ever […]

President Obama takes executive action on student-loan debt and urges Congress to do more

Here's what the White House says about the President's action yesterday on student loans: More students than ever before are relying on student loans to pay for their college education. 71 percent of students earning a bachelor's degree graduate with debt, averaging $29,400. While most students are able to repay their loans, many feel burdened […]

Ready for Bullying?

by Paul Alan Levy Last week, the pre-campaign PAC promoting Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, Ready for Hillary, demanded that both Zazzle and CafePress, the rival print-to-order companies that designers use to fill orders for Tshirts and other paraphernalia displaying their designs, stop selling material displaying the following design: The design, created by Liberty Maniac’s Dan […]