Responding to the Washington Post's heart-wrenching investigative report this weekend about predatory lien-buying practices causing D.C. homeowners to lose their homes — a story Brian flagged last night — Mayor Vincent Gray promises action "as quickly as possible," reports the Post today: "Gray said he would introduce emergency legislation next week to put a moratorium […]
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by Brian Wolfman We've blogged here about the difficulty of altering unhealthy or economically destructive behavior through public-education campaigns or mandated disclosures. Bringing down smoking rates took a lot of work. In 1964, the U.S. government said for the first time that smoking causes cancer. The next year, cigarette packages were required by law to […]
Read it here. Here's the page-one, top-of-the-paper headline in today's Washington Post: This man [pictured above the fold in the Post] owed $134 in property taxes. The District [of Columbia] sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 home and sold it. He and many other homeowners like him were LEFT WITH […]
Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), individuals and families can buy private health insurance coverage through in state-sponsored markets (also known as "exchnages"). The markets open for business in October 2013. The insurance coverage purchased in those markets will take effect on January 1, 2014. We posted earlier that health insurance premiums will be 50% […]
That's one of the topics of an article by Nathan Newman entitled "The Costs of Lost Privacy: Consumer Harm and Rising Economic Inequality in the Age of Google." Here is the abstract: This article emphasizes the broad consumer harm from the extraction of personal user data deployed by Google and many other online companies for […]
Unless you live in a handful of states, the answer is no, according to this informative article by Chris Morran. An excerpt: Many of us have the option of taking at least one brief lunch and/or rest break during the work day (whether you take it or not is a different discussion), and lots of […]
By Paul Bland, Senior Attorney at Public Justice @PblandBland Periodically, people ask me rhetorical questions like, "How much worse can the law of arbitration get? I mean, it's so incredibly bad that it has to have bottomed out, right?" As Jane Wagner famously wrote, no matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep […]
Read about it here. Here's an excerpt: Hiring a nonlawyer to do legal work carries the risk of a bad outcome, but the stakes can be especially high for immigrants. Misfiled forms or missed deadlines can lead to deportation. Legal fraud targeting immigrants is on the rise, according to immigration lawyers who blame confusion arising […]
by Paul Alan Levy Over the course of more than twenty years of representing union members in litigation over issues of union democracy, before my main focus switched to Internet law and IP issues, I found that in some unions, the leaders think nothing of spending other peoples’ money – the union treasury that is […]
by Paul Alan Levy The Manhattan Lasik Center secures customers, in part, by offering discounts through Groupon and similar online marketing programs. For a $1795 Groupon, for example, a customer can get lasik treatment for both eyes. Several reviews posted on Yelp, however, suggest that it is not at all unusual for patients to appear […]