Today, a group of parents from California, New York, Tennessee, and Virginia appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a case in which the district court last month approved a settlement between Facebook and class of plaintiffs alleging privacy violations. As we've described before, the settlement is bad deal; particularly […]
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The Virginia Supreme Court has enforced an arbitration agreement against a housekeeper who sought to sue her former boss after he physically assaulted her. By this point, like it or not (not), consumer and worker advocates expect to find arbitration clauses hidden in virtually all of our form contracts, whether it be for our cell […]
…filing pro-business, often anti-consumer briefs. Reuters has the story, which provides as one example a case in which the Chamber "argu[ed] that a landfill operator should not have to pay certain damages to nearby residents for the irritating or offensive odors the facility produced. In August, the court issued a ruling in line with what […]
Many low-income people don't have bank accounts and have to pay fees and incur other costs to get access to their money. Lisa Servon at The Atlantic has written"The Real Reason the Poor Go Without Bank Accounts." Read the whole thing and take a look right now at Servon's concluding paragraph: The banking industry needs […]
Consumers’ ability to address and seek redress for deceptive practices through private litigation is threatened by a recent decision of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. In Carrera v. Bayer (like the FTC case discussed in the post below, a case about deceptive practices involving a dietary supplement), the court recently held that, if the […]
The FTC reported yesterday 7,979 checks averaging $27.42 each to consumers who bought "Wal-Born" dietary supplements sold by the pharmacy chain Walgreens are now being mailed. The FTC’s press release explains: In 2010, Walgreens settled FTC charges that it deceptively advertised that the supplements could effectively prevent colds, fight germs, and boost the immune system. […]
We posted late last year about a Second Circuit decision that circumscribed the government's authority to criminalize off-label prescription-drug promotion on First Amendment grounds. Now, law professor Christopher Robertson has written "When Truth Cannot Be Presumed: The Regulation of Drug Promotion Under an Expanding First Amendment," which discusses the issue. Here is the abstract: The Food, […]
Yesterday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued this order requiring Chase Bank and JPMorgan Chase Bank to refund around $321 million to consumers who were charged on their credit cards for add-on services that they did not receive. That's right, the CFPB found that these banks charged for things that their customers just did […]
George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University – Department of Social and Decision Sciences ("CMU"), Cass R. Sunstein of Harvard Law School, and Russell Golman, also of CMU, have written Disclosure: Psychology Changes Everything. Here's the abstract: We review literature examining the effects of laws and regulations that require public disclosure of information. These requirements are […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has just launched this website filled with data provided by financial institutions under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), which requires those institutions to report and publicly disclose information about mortgages. HMDA became law in 1975 and is implemented through Regulation C. In 2009, the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation […]