By now, you have probably heard of the two new mortgage foreclosure settlements with federal regulators, one in which 10 banks have settled for $8.5 billion. (In the other settlement, mega-lender Bank of America will pay Fannie Mae almost $10.4 billion. mostly to buy back bad mortgages it had earlier sold to Fannie.) $3.3 billion […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
by Brian Wolfman The President campaigned emphatically on a tax plan that would raise taxes for people making more than $250,000. He was equally emphatic that he would not abide a tax bill that would raise taxes on middle-income working families. He said this many times. Democrats made the same point: We can't let the […]
That's the name of this brand-new 344-page ebook on public debt in the United States edited by Franklin Allen, Anna Gelpern, Charles Mooney, and David Skeel. The book contains 15 articles on the public debt, including one called "Origins of the Fiscal Constitution" by Michael McConnell, a couple articles on the U.S. government's capacity to […]
In fact, there were fewer airline crashes involving passengers — 11 — than in any year since 1945. Read about it here.
by Brian Wolfman The FDA has issued two proposed rules to implement the Food Saftey Modernization Act enacted in 2011. Check out the FDA's home page for the new rules. The law seeks to do more to prevent food borne illness. The first new rule concerns controls for human food and is aimed at the […]
by Maura Dundon, Senior Policy Counsel, Center for Responsible Lending Military consumers get a federal private right of action Recent amendments to the Military Lending Act (aka the Talent Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act) provide a rare, new private right of action for military consumers—but the effectiveness of the potentially broad-sweeping Act still […]
The LA Times's David Lazurus says in this article that the large-sounding corporate criminal penalties — like recent ones against Glaxo for off-label drug promotion and against BP for conduct that led to the Gulf oil spill — aren't enough to deter and that some corporate criminals should spend time behind bars. Here's an excerpt: If […]
by Paul Alan Levy Last summer, I blogged about trademark claims threatened by Charles Carreon, a California lawyer with a notorious past who maintains a private practice out of his home in Arizona. He had threatened suit against an anonymous blogger for making fun of Carreon at a web site using the domain name charles-carreon.com, […]
by Paul Alan Levy The Virginia Supreme Court has summarily reversed a preliminary injunction requiring the author of a consumer review criticizing a Washington DC contractor to revise her statements about the contractor. We filed a petition for review arguing that the injunction was an impermissible prior restraint, in addition to violating the common law […]
We posted in late November about the Supreme Court's unanimous per curiam Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) decision in Nitro-Lift Technologies v. Howard. There, the Justices held that, in light of an arbitration clause, only an arbitrator and not the Oklahoma courts could, in the first instance, hold contract provisions unenforceable. Now, in this article, Rochelle Broboff […]