As the Post explains, The Social Security Administration announced Monday that it will immediately cease efforts to collect on taxpayers’ debts to the government that are more than 10 years old. The action comes after The Washington Post reported that the government was seizing state and federal tax refunds that were on their way to […]
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Read the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's 2013 Consumer Reponse Annual Report, which is the agency's name for its comprehensive report on consumer complaints to the agency. Among other things, it explains how the CFPB handles complaints and then reviews complaints by type, including, for instance, debt collection, mortgages, credit cards, and payday loans. CFPB director […]
Should assessment of a drug's labeling be the bottom line in deciding whether a drug manufacturer has failed adequately to warn doctors of a drug's hazards? Or should tort law take into account marketing by the manufacturer's drug reps, who may soft-pedal those hazards. These issues are taken up Failure to Warn: Facing Up to […]
by Paul Alan Levy Over at Techdirt, Tim Cushing points us to a bizzare situation in the Ninth Circuit rule in which the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press was required to file its amicus brief supporting EFF’s position in litigation over National Security Letters under seal. The Reporters Committee’s announcement of its brief […]
With poignant timing (as Kansas City mourns three deaths yesterday from a shooting spree by a KKK-linked gunman at a Jewish community center, and the nation this week marks the anniversaries of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing), the Washington Post has a thought-provoking opinion piece from Justice Stevens, one of the […]
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) is calling for papers from scholars in commercial and consumer law for presentation at its annual meeting in January 2015. The "call" is reproduced after the jump.
We've told you before about the mammoth "tax gap"– the difference between what Americans ought to pay in federal taxes and the amount that they actually pay: The IRS even publishes a tax gap map, which identifies the sources of the missing revenue. We've posted about the federal budget sequester and the craziness of cutting the IRS […]
Law professor Rhonda Wasserman has written Cy Pres in Class Action Settlements. Here is the abstract: Monies reserved to settle class action lawsuits often go unclaimed because absent class members cannot be identified or notified or because the paperwork required is too onerous. Rather than allow the unclaimed funds to revert to the defendant or escheat […]
A fascinating talk here today from Acting Chairman Adler, who displayed a wide range of expertise and institutional memory about the CPSC's history, jurisdiction, and actions. Although his outlook is generally pro-regulatory, he also pointed to the importance of protecting small businesses from overly onerous regulations; he came across as neither inflexible nor one-sided in […]
by Paul Alan Levy When I was pulling together my recent analysis of Hadeed Carpet Cleaning’s assertion that its negative reviews had appeared on Yelp only after it pulled its advertising from Yelp, I figured that it might be helpful if I ran a cross-check against how Hadeed is portrayed on other web sites that […]