Reuters reports on how protective orders sealing evidence about defective cars, drugs, and other products from public view can hide health and safety information from the public and impede government agencies — such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration — from protecting the public. The article is here.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The Hill reports: Roughly 58.5 billion robocalls were made in the U.S. last year, according to new research, marking a 22 percent increase from 2018. YouMail, a company that provides a service to block robocalls, estimated that the average American received 178.3 robocalls during the year. The full story is here.
A report released Tuesday by the Norwegian Consumer Council, a government-funded nonprofit organization in Oslo, describes how apps on our phones systematically violate users’ privacy collecting and sharing information with third-party advertisers without users’ knowledge or consent. The report "demonstrate[s] how every time we use our phones, a large number of shadowy entities that are […]
The Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School has released a report examining both safety risks and disappearing legal rights for commuters and business travelers. The study presents an overview of some of the most common yet dangerous methods of transportation today and explores the shrinking legal options available to individuals harmed […]
An investigation by Senator Cantwell's oversight staff found that a "series of high-profile failures to effectively recall dangerous products has called into question the ability of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to adequately protect American consumers from unsafe and defective products. An extensive review by U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation […]
The Washington Post today reports on the expected effect of California's consumer privacy law, which was enacted in June 2018 and takes effect on January 1, 2020. The law aims to protect consumers from having their information sold without their knowledge or consent. The article — Calif consumer privacy law can affect businesses across U.S. […]
The New York Times has a lengthy piece today on location tracking through smartphones. Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times […]
An article in The Atlantic yesterday reported on apps that offer "advances" on salary. Although the companies that offer the apps insist that the advances are not "loans," the article explains that the companies look a lot like payday lenders. The "advances" come with many of the same problems as payday loans, problems that have […]
An article in Slate today addresses the Supreme Court's cases greatly restricting the availability of class actions as a recourse for the powerless against the powerful, largely through an atextual expansion of the Federal Arbitration Act. As the article notes, "[t]he swift decline of class actions over the last decade is regularly framed as an […]
That's the name of this article by law profs John Brooks and David Gamage. Here is the abstract: Wealth tax reform proposals are playing a major role in the 2020 presidential campaign. However, some opponents of these wealth tax reform proposals have claimed that a wealth tax would be unconstitutional. Other prominent critics have argued […]