Last week the California Supreme Court granted review in People v. Miami Nation Enterprises, which presents the issue of when a payday lending operation that is formally owned by a Native American tribe but run by a third-party who keeps most of the proceeds is protected by tribal sovereign immunity. The practice of payday lenders […]
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by Paul Alan Levy In an opinion issued this morning, the D.C. Circuit unanimously reversed a trial court ruling that compelled several ISP's to provide identifying information for more than a thousand anonymous users who were sued a maker of pornographic movies for allegedly using the BitTorrent protocol to provide access to copies of an […]
Check out this report on the relationship between corporate executive pay and worker pay, and then read this article on the topic by David Lazarus, who points out that the salary of the CEO of CVS Caremark last year was 422 times the median wage of a CVS employee.
Remember the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (better known as the CARD Act)? The CARD Act made it more difficult for credit card companies to retroactively increase rates on existing balances or to impose large late fees, and it drastically curbed overlimit fees. The Act also sought to force credit card […]
We have discussed the increasing use by companies of non-disparagement clauses in take-it-or-leave-it consumer contracts, where the consumer "agrees" not to say anything critical of a company from which it buys something Go, for instance, here, discussing the use of these clauses in mortgage loan-modification contracts. And we have discussed repeatedly (go, for instance, here […]
Mortgage servicers increasingly are including non-disparagement clauses in loan modification agreements, including ordinary loan modifications (i.e., those that are not negotiated in settlement of litigation). In at least one instance, Ocwen, the largest non-bank servicer of mortgages in the U.S. thanks to a number of acquisitions in recent years, sought to impose a non-disparagement provision […]
…is the catchy title of an NPR reporting series airing this week about the rise of new "debtors' prisons" as a result of state and local court practices across the country. According to the written summary of the story, everyday, people go to jail because they failed to pay their court debts. In Benton County, […]
According to the FTC, a Houston-based debt collection company called Goldman Schwartz, Inc., used insults, lies, and false threats of imprisonment to collect on payday loans. Under a settlement announced this week, the company’s owner will surrender his assets, approximately $550,000, to pay restitution to consumers who were charged unauthorized fees. The settlement also permanently […]
by Paul Alan Levy In the discussion of yesterday’s decision rejecting a lawsuit by the DC Council against Mayor Vincent Gray, I found a procedural puzzlement. The City Council sued Gray for a declaratory judgment and an injunction compelling him to comply with the Local Budget Autonomy Act; Gray counterclaimed for a declaratory judgment that […]
by Paul Alan Levy I wrote recently about a letter from an HHS lawyer, Dale Berkley, that appeared to threaten a blogger with a lawsuit for defamation because the blogger had published a mock interview with a an HHS official which, the demand letter said, could have misled readers into believing that the official had […]