That's the title of this piece in The Hill by law prof Lauren Willis. WIllis's bio notes that "[s]he is a leading critic of the use of financial education, disclosures, and 'nudges' (default settings) in consumer policy-making." Willis's Hill piece applies that critique to the regulatory approach of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the direction […]
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ProPublica has a new report out today called "The Deadly Race: How Amazon Hooked America on Fast Delivery While Avoiding Responsibility for Crashes." The report explains that "Amazon has built a huge logistics operation in recent years to get more goods to customers’ homes in less and less time. As it moves to reduce its […]
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program encourages graduates to work in public service jobs by forgiving federal student loan balances for borrowers who have made 10 years of payments while in certain public service jobs. In 2018, after the Department of Education forgave few loans, Congress temporarily expanded the program to include more borrowers. According […]
Last year, the California legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act, which grants internet users the right to see the personal information that companies collect about them and stop it from being sold. The law applies only to residents of California, but privacy advocates hope it might serve as a model for other states or […]
The Ninth Circuit today issued its decision in Animal Legal Defense Fund v. USDA. Here's the court's summary of the decision: The panel reversed in part and affirmed in part the district court’s dismissal for lack of subject matter jurisdiction of plaintiffs’ action against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, alleging claims under the Freedom of […]
Law prof Adam Levitin has written The Fast and the Usurious: Putting the Brakes on Auto Lending Abuses. Here is the abstract: The car loan market is rife with consumer abuses: inflated pricing, discriminatory lending, and a variety of deceptions and scams. These abuses all stem from the dealer-centric nature of the auto finance market […]
Yesterday, in Davis v. Oasis Legal Finance Operating Company, the Eleventh Circuit struck down contractual forum-selection and class-action-waiver clauses as contrary to public policy. In Davis, a class of borrowers sued lenders, claiming that their loan agreements violated Georgia usury laws. The lenders sought to tank the case on the basis of contractual forum-selection and […]
The Eleventh Circuit has just held in Salcedo v. Hanna that, under the circumstances pleaded there, a plaintiff who received one unsolicited text message lacked Article III standing to sue under Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The court relied on the Supreme Court's decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), and maintained […]
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is hiring again, following a 15 percent loss of staff since the Trump Administration took over the agency in late 2017. The CFPB "recently lifted a nearly two-year hiring freeze, according to an internal email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It also has […]
The Ninth Circuit has held, in Dorman v. Charles Schwab, that ERISA claims (brought in court in a class action) can be forced out of court and into individual arbitration through an arbitration clause in an amendment to an ERISA 401(k) plan forced on Schwab's employees. Here's how the Ninth Circuit's informal summary explains the […]