Category Archives: Uncategorized

“How Payday Lenders Spent $1 Million at a Trump Resort — and Cashed In”

That's the title of this ProPublica piece by Anjali Tsui and Alice Wilder. Among other things, this article explains that the payday loan industry's trade group has held its last two annual conventions at a Trump property while at the same time that the Trump Administration's regulatory stance has been decidedly pro-payday lending. The article […]

Company to cancel and repay $40 million in payday loans that violated state rate caps

The Dallas Morning News reports that Think Finance Inc., a Fort Worth financial firm, will cancel its outstanding loans and pay nearly $40 million to consumers after engaging in an alleged payday lending operation that used Native American tribes as shields from state laws. Think Finance serviced loans that charged interest rates over 375% and […]

Supreme Court: Virginia law banning uranium mining is not preempted by federal law

In yesterday's opinion in Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, the Supreme Court held that a Virginia law banning uranium mining is not preempted by the Atomic Energy Act. The vote was 6 to 3, with the six Justices in the majority divided between two separate opinions—the first announcing the judgment of the Court, written by […]

Essay on common characteristics and problems in aggregated litigation

In The Continuum of Aggregation, law prof Alexi Lahav discusses the commonalities in various types of aggregated litigation. Here is the abstract: This essay, written for a conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the multidistrict litigation statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1407, traces the evolution in thinking about aggregation, analyzes the forms of aggregate litigation — […]

Ninth Circuit: TCPA Survives Constitutional Challenge After Minor Cosmetic Surgery

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday rejected Facebook's effort to avoid a Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. Facebook had argued that a recent amendment to the law, which excepted calls seeking to collect debts owed to or guaranteed by the federal government from the TCPA's ban on […]

Senators ask CFPB to reconsider debt collection proposal

More than 20 U.S. senators are calling on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to reconsider a proposal to allow debt collectors to send unlimited texts and emails to consumers, and to call consumers seven times a week per debt, USA Today reports. “By allowing debt collectors to send consumers unlimited text messages and emails without […]

New challenges for Mathew Higbee and his clients

by Paul Alan Levy About a month ago, I blogged about a new variant in Matthew Higbee’s high-volume copyright enforcement practice on behalf of photographers, in which he was pursuing the hosts of online forums where users had posted copyrighted photographs or deep links to copyrighted photographs, taking advantage of those hosts who had failed […]

The rule of law in multi-district litigation

I think our readers might be interested in The Rule of Law in Multidistrict Litigation by law prof David Noll. Here's the abstract: From the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the opioid crisis, multidistrict litigation — or simply MDL — has become the preeminent forum for devising solutions to the most difficult problems in the federal […]