Businesses these days will go to great lengths to force their customers into arbitration and deny them access to the civil justice system. Sometimes that extends to trying to enforce an arbitration agreement that the customer is not a party to; other times, that extends to trying to enforce an arbitration agreement that the company […]
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by Theresa Amato [guest post] [cross-posted from faircontracts.org] The Fine Print, a Fine Read on How a Rigged Economy Harms Consumers Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston asks why the United States ranks forty-seventh out of 224 countries in infant mortality, forty-sixth in the share of our economy spent on public education, thirty-seventh in the […]
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear McBurney v. Young, which presents the following question: Under the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV and the dormant Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, may a state preclude citizens of other states from enjoying the same right of access to public records that the state […]
Recently, we've discussed (here and here) eBay's terrible new forced arbitration clause that prohibits its customers from going to court and bans class actions. Class actions are often the only way to hold corporations accountable when they break the law and harm their customers. We told you that eBay is trying to give the world […]
In a pay-for-delay settlement, a brand-name drug company pays a generic company that has challenged the brand-name company's patent to stay out of the market. Some early antitrust challenges to these settlements succeeded, but later court of appeals' rulings gave them a green light. But, as we discussed in this post in July, the Third Circuit […]
We posted recently about whether California will become the first state in the U.S. to require labeling of genetically engineered food. Now, the Center for Food Safety has posted this map showing which countries have what labeling requirements for genetically engineered foods. (HT to Andrew Kaufman)
A couple weeks ago we discussed (here and here) eBay's new binding arbitration clause that will keep its customers out of court and ban class actions. Now, David Lazarus of the LA Times has penned this article about eBay's efforts to take away its customers' rights through arbitration.
The short version, coauthored with John DeStefano, is at HuffPo. Here's an excerpt: CIRC is a system for scoring local banks on a variety of issues that are important to consumers, like the amount banks charge their customers to open and maintain accounts, the location of their local branches and ATMs, and the nature and extent […]
As explained in this article by Todd Ruger, the "liberal public interest group [Alliance for Justice] in Washington released a new documentary Monday that focuses on three Supreme Court rulings that the group says has favored big businesses at the expense of consumers and victims of discrimination." Click here or on the video embedded below […]
When a Supreme Court justice decides not to participate in a case, he or she is not required by law to say why (and rarely does). Similarly, when a party asks a Supreme Court justice to recuse and the justice doesn't, typically neither the justice nor the Court says why. In this extensive analysis, the […]