The Federal Reserve just issued its most recent quarterly report on household debt and credit. Though it reviews household debt and credit of all sorts, I was interested in what it had to say about student-loan debt: • Outstanding student loan balances reported on credit reports increased to $1.08 trillion (+$53 billion) as of December […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
by Paul Alan Levy Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a moot court at Georgetown Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute for the upcoming Supreme Court argument in Octane Fitness v. Icon Health & Fitness, in which the Court will have the opportunity to nix the very restrictive standard applied by the Federal Circuit […]
The Food and Drug Administration announced today that it has issued orders to stop the sale and distribution of four tobacco products currently on the market. The orders are the first time that the FDA has used its authority under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act to order a manufacturer to stop selling […]
Check out this thought-provoking piece of reporting from NPR about where an undergraduate student's tuition dollars go and the debate over what should be included in calculating the cost of a student's education. Depending on who's answering that question, one can view tuition as terribly inflated or — if you count financial aid subsidies and […]
by Paul Alan Levy This week Public Citizen became involved in a case pending in a trial court in Alabama, in which a lawyer is handling both a mass action and a class action against an exterminating company named A-1 Exterminating and its affiliates. Plaintiffs allege that A-1 both provides bad services and fraudulently advertising […]
Within a matter of days, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans for a broad network of license plate readers to collect information on Americans' movements nationwide, and then scrapped it. So it appears that on the right issues, at the right moments, privacy advocates and the people they represent have some pull. Wish this […]
by Andrew D. Selbst, guest blogger A month ago, I wrote about Verizon v. FCC, the D.C. Circuit decision striking down the FCC’s net neutrality regulations. In that post, I noted that the decision contained two distinct holdings. First, the FCC could not impose common carrier regulations (net neutrality is one such regulation) on broadband […]
James Surowiecki, The New Yorker’s financial writer, has this interesting analysis this week about how corporate brands are less valuable than they once were – thanks to the proliferation of consumer information.
by Paul Alan Levy Somewhat more than 25 years ago, I represented a federal prisoner named Brett Kimberlin who made a sensational accusation against a sitting Senator who was running for Vice-President – Kimberlin claimed that, during his extensive career as a drug dealer, one of his customers had been a then-law-student who was the […]
We don’t often have occasion to praise debt collectors on this site, so it’s worth taking note when a debt collection company does the right thing. As many of you will remember from previous posts (see here and here), an online retailer called KlearGear tried to extort $3500 from its customer John Palmer because his […]